The holidays usually bring several things to a small business – more foot traffic, celebratory decorations and additional staff to help with boosted sales.  However, with added customers and distractions, slips and trips are never far away. So when getting into the holiday spirit, you should make safety a priority.

Training employees on safety practices key to reducing injuries

New or seasonal hires often bring greater risk when it comes to frequency of injuries. In fact, they are five-times more likely to experience an injury in their first month of employment which can be significant enough to require them to miss work, leaving you short-handed at a time when you need all hands on deck*.

Therefore, training employees in workplace safety from day one is key. Helpful tips to keep in mind when safeguarding your store include:

• Make sure new hires are familiar with their surroundings and responsibilities. While they may have a lot of industry experience, your unique facility is still unfamiliar territory.
• Train employees in proper lifting techniques and ladder safety.
• Ensure that your candles are battery operated. Decorations also go hand-in-hand with potential accidents and injuries. According to the National Fire Protection Association, the top 4 highest days of the year for candle fires happen between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. So in a busy retail environment, or even in the office, faux candles may be best.
• Choose your decorations wisely. Many of them are combustible, or will burn. Things like paper, decorated trees and wreaths will increase the fire load in a small business. Keep them away from heat or other ignition sources.
• Use extension cords properly, and be sure you aren’t ”daisy-chaining” them in order to extend a decoration or a theme to an area where the plug cannot reach. Aside from a potential trip and fall incident, this is also a fire hazard.
• Choose smart locations for any additional holiday displays and products. Be sure you are not covering up emergency exit signs, over-crowding aisle ways—anything that would make it difficult to get out in an emergency situation.
• Be sure decorations are secured properly and traffic can navigate easily around them, especially when it comes to big displays.
• Maintain appropriate inventory levels. Over-stocking shelves could lead to items toppling onto staff or customers.
• As a general rule, always take the time to scan your facility to make sure it’s safe for customers and employees. It should be a part of your daily process to open and/or close up shop.

The highest profile cyber incidents – such as major data breaches at Sony, Zappos, Global Payments, and Nationwide Insurance, and the disruption to Netflix’s service on Christmas Eve due to problems with Amazon’s cloud service – may dominate the news, but the bigger issue is just how pervasive such problems are.

Every company that uses computing and networking technologies faces a variety of potential cyber liabilities, including:

• repair, restoration, or replacement of data or services;
• notification of affected customers of a data breach…

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So what is Cloud Computing?

According to the official NIST definition, “cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”, with the following 5 characteristics:

• On-demand self-service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity or expansion
• Measured service

and 2 service models:

• Software-as-a-service: A remotely hosted, on-demand version of software. Examples include the popular customer relationship management offering from Salesforce.com.
• Platform-as-a-service: Provides enterprises with the hardware and software to run applications. Prominent examples include Microsoft Azure and Google Apps Engine.

We can insure technology companies that offer cloud computing services both hardware and software / system integration, including exposures coming out of Professional Liability / Errors and Omissions, including business personal property, servers, buildings and data centers. Many different coverage options and carriers for small (up to $500K in sales) and medium (half a million and more in annual gross sales).
Get business insurance quotes now – instant quotes and coverage.