Purchasing Resources for Hard Hats

Making the Most of Hard Hats

Get your crew to wear their hard hats
By Lori Rogers-Stokes You know that hard hats are required at work sites. Your crew knows they must wear their hard hats for their own safety. But chances are once your back -- or your foreman's back -- is turned, hats come off. Why? Hard hats can be very uncomfortable. They're cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and the one-size-fits-all approach usually results in safety hats sitting on the ground rather than on a worker's head.
 

So what to do? With a small investment on your part, you can increase hard hat compliance and decrease your liability. Here are three ways to boost hard hat use:

1. Break with tradition and use safety hats that don't look like safety hats.

2. Make hardhats comfortable with special inserts.

3. Customize your crew's hardhats to promote your business.

Introduce hard hats that break the mold

The round yellow hard hat is familiar from a thousand cartoon images. But it's not the only option out there. How about cowboy hats, baseball caps, and motorcycle helmets that are all fully compliant with safety hat regulations?
Try: Scroll down the list of inventive hard hats, including cotton baseball caps with bump inserts, at TuffRhino.com. At All About Head Protection, you'll find innovative hard hats for sale including motorcycle helmets, camouflage, national flags, NASCAR, and NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, and NCAA safety hats.

Make it easy to wear a safety hat in any weather

Hard hats can seem like primitive technology when the weather is hot or cold. In summer, plastic safety hats turn up the heat on workers' heads, and in winter their ears freeze. Luckily, there are higher-tech ways to cope than layers of bandannas.
Try: Go to Discount Safety Gear.com for winter liners, cool packs, removable/washable sweatbands, and shades. Explore Products offers a heated face mask that can be worn under a hard hat; its built-in pockets hold hand warmers that provide heat for 10 hours.

Mix safety and advertising with custom hard hats

While you're making the most of hard hats for your crew, why not promote your business, too? Putting your company logo on safety hats identifies your workers and advertises your business. When hard hats are less anonymous, they register with your workers as a necessary part of the uniform in more ways than one.
Try: At AGI Solutions you'll see many options for basic, no-frills hard hat decals. DeSIGNerySigns.com offers more colorful and artistic decals for your hard hats.

• About one-third of workplace impact injuries to the head happen when workers bump into a stationary object with no hard hat on. These injuries often occur inside buildings, where workers assume they are safe because there are no falling objects. Make sure your team wear their hard hats inside work site buildings at all times.