The winter months are tough on everyone. Of course, just because everyone is struggling, that doesn’t mean your business should be slacking. You have a duty not only to keep your business functioning well through the Christmas season and following wintery, freezing months, but also to ensure your employees are warm; else, productivity will fall, and you’ll have failed in your duty of care.

As an employer, it can be hard to know just exactly what you should be doing to prepare for winter. How do you balance the difficulty of running a business during dire weather conditions and holiday-based, shopping-frenzy chaos with the difficulty of appealing to cold and overworked employees?

Prepare for all manner of weather conditions.

Whilst it won’t be snowing every day during winter, there are things you should be doing to prepare for the possibility of heavy snowfall. It might look fluffy, soft and fun in pictures and when you’re playing around with friends or family, but snow can become rather heavy during extended periods of fall, which is why your business should ensure roofs, and all external elements of the buildings in which you’re based, are prepared for this.

Nonetheless, even if it doesn’t snow, winter can bring other weather abnormalities that you need to be considering preemptively. Freezing cold temperatures can lead to icy roads, frozen pipes and other problems for both your business and the employees hoping to travel in each day. You have to consider the safety hazards this presents, as well as the inconvenience to your business.

For example, accidents on the company car park, either through car crashes or workers simply slipping as they walk towards the company entrance, could cause numerous problems for you in terms of violated safety protocols and injured workers who can’t cover the workload you need them to cover over these busy months.

Ensure your heating is fully functional.

This one needs no real explanation. It’s winter, and it’s cold outside. Warm blankets can only take you so far, and fires are both expensive and environmentally damaging. Try to take the financially viable and safer route this winter, because temperatures below freezing can be extremely threatening to the health of you or your family, though it’s easy to feel safe within your own home. The young and the elderly are especially susceptible during winter, so don’t cut corners when it comes to your heating.

It might be time to check that your heating is functioning as well as it could be, because a failure during winter presents a health hazard for you and everybody else working within your company’s building. Get help from a heating and A/C company before something breaks, preferably, but just ensure that everything is maintained to a standard at which it would be very unlikely for sudden problems to arise over the winter period.

If your heating does break, of course, make sure you have a backup plan; rapid repair service, backup heaters, or some sort of temporary office replacement. The safety of your workers is of the utmost importance. That’s why you have to make sure the job is done properly, so that your heating won’t break on a freezing cold night, leaving you with no last-minute options. Prepare for the winter season early when it comes to heating, because you don’t want to be caught out.