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What is Workplace Safety and Why is it Important?
Workplace safety is about protecting your business’s most important assets – your employees – by preventing injury and illness in the workplace. Workplace safety is good business. Not only does it increase employee satisfaction, it has clear and measurable return on investment (ROI).
By protecting your employees’ well-being, you can reduce the amount of money paid out in health insurance benefits, workers’ compensation benefits and the cost of wages for temporary help. In addition to the direct financial benefits of safety programs, there are quite a few indirect benefits as well when you factor in the following:
• Cost of lost-work hours (days away from work or restricted hours or job transfer)
• Time spent in orienting temporary help
• The programs and services that may suffer due to fewer service providers
• Stress on those providers who are picking up the absent workers’ share
• Worse case, having to suspend or shut down a program due to lack of providers
A recent Liberty Mutual poll of executives shows that for every $1 spent on direct costs related to an accident, there are another $3 to $5 worth of indirect costs...putting the actual cost of an accident (with direct medical and compensation costs of $15,000) at somewhere between $45,000 and $75,000. Most executives polled by Liberty Mutual said that for every $1 their company spent on workplace safety, they saved at least $3.
There is an abundance of data to support the value of workplace safety programs, and while many employers support the concept of workplace safety, they aren’t sure how to put a program in place. It all starts with creating a corporate culture that promotes safety at every level of your organization.
