Data Center Health and Safety Checklist: Essential Steps for Maintaining a Safe Workplace

Let’s state the obvious – data centers are complex environments. With all the high-risk situations your employees face in data centers, it’s crucial to keep up rigorous health and safety protocols.

It’s not easy to handle heavy electrical systems, manage ergonomic challenges, and respond to potential fire or environmental hazards.

71% of employees still go to work regardless of feeling unwell because they want to avoid the stigma of calling in sick. So, it’s more important than ever to create a safe and healthy work culture to keep your employees happy and healthy.

As an employer, it is your responsibility to prevent accidents from data center health hazards and make sure operations go uninterrupted. That’s why you need to adhere to a data center health and safety checklist.

In this step-by-step guide, we will tell you the 10 essential steps you should take to protect your employees and assets while maintaining compliance with safety standards. Let’s get started.

Comprehensive Data Center Safety Checklist

Creating your own guidelines from scratch can be complex. That’s why we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of essential data center health and safety guidelines for you to add to your checklist.

Ultimately, we’ll help you address key safety protocols, minimize risks, and ensure your employees are well-prepared and equipped to handle potential hazards in data centers.

1. Conduct a Full Risk Assessment

Starting with our data center health and safety checklist, let’s talk about risk assessments. As a cornerstone of data center safety, regular risk assessments help you:

• Identify your risks: Focus on finding electrical hazards, falls from heights, and any dangers that can be posed by machinery or temporary structures.
• Evaluate their severity: What is the likelihood of each hazard and what could the repercussions be? Pay special attention to high-risk areas like electrical rooms.
• Control potential hazards: Lastly, implement protocols to mitigate your risks. For example, installing safety barriers, signage, and hazard zones is a good place to start.

Risk assessments should be in your data center safety procedures list as a regular process. Conduct them monthly or whenever you introduce new equipment, construction phases, or tasks.

2. Ensure Proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

The next point you should include in your data center health checklist is PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). This is vital for keeping your employees safer in high-risk environments. 

First, it is your responsibility to provide the appropriate gear, such as helmets, gloves, goggles, anti-slip boots, etc. For tasks that involve higher risk, include harnesses, face shields, or flame-resistant clothing.

Next, you need to ensure that your employees comply with your protocols. Hold regular inspections and make PPE mandatory for all workers. Your supervisors should enforce compliance as well.

Lastly, train your staff on how to correctly use and maintain their protective gear to make sure they are safe. For tasks like working at heights or handling hazardous materials, you can include demonstrations.

3. Develop Equipment-Specific Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) Procedures

Lockout/Tagout procedures need to be in place to make sure your machinery is safely de-energized during maintenance. Here are 3 steps you need to take:

• Establish your LOTO protocols and standardize the procedures for shutting off equipment during repairs, making sure they stay off until maintenance is completed.
• Make sure your staff understands all the steps for locking and tagging out equipment.
• Label your equipment with LOTO statuses and give all your personnel the proper documentation. As a best practice, you can use tags to indicate who is responsible for the lockout and the reason for the procedure.
• Train your staff on an ongoing basis to keep them sharp and educated.

Meeting OSHA requirements for LOTO procedures shouldn’t be your end goal. Instead, you should build upon them to create a truly comprehensive data center health and safety checklist to keep your data center and workers safe.

4. Implement Electrical Safety Guidelines

Electrical systems heavily rely on power systems, which makes them a critical hazard in construction safety management. That’s why implementing electrical safety guidelines in your data center safety plan is simply a must. Here’s what you should do:

• Regularly inspect your electrical infrastructure

This includes checking your wiring, circuits, and breaker panels for damage or wear. You should also use thermal imaging to identify overheating in equipment before failures occur.

• Train your qualified personnel

Only your certified electricians and trained employees should be dealing with electrical systems. Generally, it is a good idea to train all your staff in electrical hazard awareness and safe workplace practices where high voltage is involved.

• Minimize energized work

Putting a limit on the tasks that involve live systems is a good idea. If such work is unavoidable, you should implement strict safety protocols and use insulated tools or protective equipment to lower the likelihood of the hazard.

5. Enforce Safe Working at Heights Protocols

30% of workers claim to have received a serious workplace injury because of working at heights. Considering how common this sort of hazard is, your data center health and safety checklist should cover it.

Let’s talk a bit more about how you can handle regulations for installing and maintaining equipment at heights.

• Assess the areas where your employees work at heights

First things first, you need to identify the areas in your data center that require elevated work, including server racks, ladders, platforms, etc. In these areas, regular inspections of scaffolding and access platforms are essential to ensure stability and compliance.

• Use safety equipment to minimize the likelihood of hazards

As a bare minimum, you need to equip your workers with harnesses, lanyards, and other fall protection devices. It is also a good idea to install guardrails and safety nets wherever necessary to prevent injuries from falling.

• Offer height-specific training for your staff

To complete this point of your data center health and safety checklist, you should train your workers on fall protection systems, ladder, and scaffolding safety. Futureproof this protocol by making sure your workers know how to inspect their own fall protection gear before use.

6. Avoid Hot Work Near IT Equipment

Next up, you should cover construction heat safety in your data center hazard prevention checklist. Hot work, including welding and cutting, poses major fire risks. Especially around sensitive data center equipment, you should carefully control these risks.

• Section off hot work zones: Hot work activities should only be performed in designated areas away from IT equipment. You can mark these zones using temporary barriers and signage.
• Control your fire risks: Fire suppression equipment should be readily available in your data center. You should also remove any flammable materials from your work areas. Additionally, appointing a fire watch during and after hot work is a best practice you can use. 
• Be thorough in your safety checks: Before starting hot work, your supervisors and staff should inspect the area for combustible materials or poor ventilation. Plus, you should secure a hot work permit to verify that all your safety measures are in place.

7. Adopt Safe Lifting and Handling Practices

Proper lifting and material handling techniques should absolutely be covered in your data center health and safety checklist. 

These protocols and regulations can prevent musculoskeletal injuries, as well as keep your workers safe when they transport heavy equipment.

• Set manual lifting limits

Usually, the maximum manual lifting weight is set at around 50 pounds (~22.5kg). These are in place to protect your workers from injury. So, you should encourage your employees to lift heavy or awkward loads in teams.

• Implement the use of lifting devices

Your data center should have mechanical lifting aids like forklifts, cranes, or other lifts to move heavy objects. Of course, just like any other equipment you use, your lifting devices should also be inspected regularly to make sure they stay safe and reliable.

• Train your staff 

Start by training your workers in proper manual lifting techniques to help reduce the strain on their backs and other muscles. Additionally, give your staff situational awareness training to help them identify risks and prevent accidents before they happen.

8. Utilize Advanced Occupational Health Technology

Next, let’s talk about the importance of health technology for your data center safety guidelines checklist. Thanks to advanced telemedicine solutions and predictive analytics systems, you can get real-time data on the conditions in your data center. 

With this information, you can both prevent and manage the effects of potential hazards. Start with the following:

• Implement telemedicine solutions

As one of the best response technologies out there, telemedicine solutions can give your workers instant access to board-certified doctors in cases of injury. 

From diagnosis to treatment, equipping your data center with such tech will make it safer and keep your staff healthier.

• Use predictive analytics to your advantage

To go above and beyond, you can adapt tools that can predict equipment failures and prevent accidents by analyzing historical injury data. Essentially, you can improve your safety planning and start preventing recurring issues.

9. Conduct Contractor Safety Training

In data center construction, you will often rely on contractors for specialized work. Their safety should be another priority of yours. That’s why you need to train them according to your health and safety guidelines. 

Keeping contractors safe is a part of your workplace safety protocols.

Training is not an easy task. OSHA has standards in place to ensure effective training procedures. They are comprehensive, to say the least. Overall, you should ensure the following:

• Verify your contractor’s qualifications: Make sure that they meet industry safety standards before they get started on work. Additionally, you should ask for certifications and safety training for all their personnel.
• Train them on site-specific matters: Orientation and safety briefings are a must. Tell your contractors about the unique risks of your data center, including emergency procedures and specific safety equipment.
• Enforce your safety guidelines: Make sure your contractors adhere to your processes and regulations. Additionally, you should mandate the proper use of PPE and safety equipment in line with your internal protocols.

10. Maintain Regular Safety Audits and Drills

The last point we want to cover in our data center safety checklist is the upkeep of all the guidelines you put in place. So, add regular safety audits and emergency drills to your monthly to-do list. 

The goal is to maintain a safe data center environment prepared for any potential incidents. Here’s what you need to know:

• Schedule periodic audits: Review your safety systems, equipment, and protocols to check for improvement opportunities. You can even do external audits to get an unbiased view of your data center’s safety performance.
• Hold frequent emergency response drills: This includes evacuation, fire, and first aid drills. The purpose of this is to test how effective your safety procedures and emergency response plans are in real-world scenarios.
• Update your safety plans regularly: Your safety protocols should always reflect the changes you implement in your technology, staff, or building infrastructure. These updates can be made based on feedback from audits, drills, and other safety inspections.

By following this data center health and safety checklist, you will be on the right track to keeping your staff healthy and your assets safe from preventable hazards. There are, however, other ways you can use to make your safety procedures even more smooth.

How to Streamline Data Center Safety Procedures

If you want to go above and beyond with your data center health and safety checklist, there are a couple of strategies that can help optimize your protocols. With them, you can reduce downtime while staying compliant with regulations. 

So, let’s talk about our 3 effective strategies for dealing with safety issues in the workplace.

Adopt On-site Healthcare

One of the best tactics you can use for construction injury prevention is having health services available directly on-site. 

From construction site medics, medical staffing to even fully equipped medical trailers for larger data centers, having immediate onsite healthcare can make your workplace safer than ever. Your injured workers can be treated properly and timely, which will minimize your downtime. 

Unlike occupational health clinics, which are specialized medical facilities that focus on preventing, diagnosing, and treating illnesses and injuries related to the workplace, onsite solutions will spare you the complexities of injury triage and care coordination by managing the injury onsite. Ultimately, your ROI for on-site healthcare will be positive in the long run.

Rely on Physician-led Telemedicine

If you don’t opt for on-site healthcare, there is another option. You can choose to invest in telemedicine for industrial medical services and have your injured workers connect to board-certified doctors almost immediately for diagnosis and treatment.

Through occupational telemedicine, this sort of treatment can be quick, accurate, and eliminate the need for off-site visits in cases of minor injuries.

Choose an OSHA-fluent Injury Care Provider

Lastly, to improve your data center health and safety checklist even further, you can work with an injury care provider who is well-versed in OSHA regulations like JobSiteCare from the get-go. This way, you will streamline your:

• Compliance
• Documentation
• Case management
• Workers comp risk management and cost control

Ultimately, it’ll become easier to meet safety standards and prepare for audits.

Conclusion

Safety in the workplace should be your number one priority. With a comprehensive data center health and safety checklist, you can effectively manage your workplace, keeping your staff injury-free and your assets protected.

From regular safety assessments and proper use of PPE to electrical and heat work safety, our checklist contains the essential points your data center safety protocols should cover.

When it comes to supporting ongoing safety and risk management, sustainable solutions will almost always include telemedicine and on-site healthcare. With providers like JobSiteCare by your side or at your site, your safety checklist will be complete.

We have long-running expertise in workplace injury management, telehealth, on-site safety, and workers comp insurance. Let JobSiteCare handle the medical intricacies of your data center construction project by getting in touch or taking our risk assessment quiz today.

Frequently Asked Questions