When employees don’t wear protective work gloves their risk of minor and major hand injury significantly increases. With such a simple fix as wearing a pair of gloves, it is important to do the proper research to find a suitable glove for you and your employees to wear. There is a difference between general work gloves and high impact work gloves. Impact gloves are constructed with additional protection for more hazardous and heavy duty job situations. A high impact work glove will have a harder outer shell on the back of the hand and fingers. This shell is typically a thick and dense rubbery material that is affixed to the glove. The segments of this protective rubber material are placed very strategically so that they are able to minimize and buffer any potential impact that might occur. Believe it or not, this rigid rubber protection improves hand movements because it is still flexible enough to move with natural hand movements.
Depending on your specific industry or work environment, you might want to select impact gloves with additional protective features. If you work in oil drilling or other oil related industries, you will be dealing with a lot of slippery material, so you’ll want an added palm coating to improve grip while working. If you work in a mechanical, automotive, or manufacturing industry, you will probably need a higher level of dexterity. So you’ll want to find an impact glove that is more breathable and flexible than others.
Breathability is an important feature to keep in mind because it has advantages in both cold and hot environments. In the winter, your hands still sweat, but because its cold, your hands feel frigid. In the summer your hands get too hot. A glove with good ventilation and wicking capabilities will solve both of these problems.
Sometimes it is tempting to just choose the highest level of protection when choosing a work glove. This can actually be quite dangerous, and we recommend choosing an appropriate level of protection for each task. If you have a glove that is too protective, it will most likely be very thick and heavy. This will drastically reduce dexterity causing workers to more easily drop tools and makes it harder for them to handle equipment effectively. And even worse, because of the frustration of dealing with little to no dexterity, workers may even remove the gloves while completing a task, which leaves them totally unprotected and in harms way.
For the sake of the safety of yourself and your workers, give them the chance to prevent costly injuries with impact resistant work gloves.