Discover an Essential Workplace Safety Book

The faces of safety are many: the parents, significant others, husbands, wives, children, and babies who will grow up and never have an opportunity to say “I love you” to their parents. The cost of an injury or fatality can never be fully measured in dollars. How can you put a price on a life that means so much to someone else?

Accidents can happen in the blink of an eye and change lives forever. Employees come to work with baggage every day: the work they’re performing and what they need to do to protect themselves may not be at the forefront of their minds. They’re distracted, overwhelmed, and pressured to get the workout, and then tragedy strikes. Don’t let three seconds destroy your employees’ lives or your company’s future.

The cost of being reactive—waiting until after an accident, injury, or death—could cost millions of dollars. Why wait to take care of hazards until after an incident?

How committed are you to protecting your employees by providing the necessary resources, staffing, equipment, and training? How will you make sure you implement safety as a core component of your company’s values?

The lives of your employees and their families depend on your investment in safety. A well-thought-out, well-implemented safety program managed by a safety professional is a business function you can’t afford to include in your budget. You can’t fake safety, you can’t ignore it, and you can’t half-ass it.

Every employee, from the most junior to the C-suite, needs to know the company’s safety expectations. Communicate these both formally and informally, verbally and in writing, and have the person being briefed acknowledge that they understand them. Encourage them to ask questions and recommend adjustments where they see a need. Make it known that nobody is exempt from safety procedures and back that up with disciplinary action if required. The choice is yours: expectations and accountability—or chaos.

It’s time to evaluate your core values and ensure that safety is among them. A lack of commitment to safety can affect the orderly running of your company and its future. Customers and other companies may not want to do business with you if you have a stack of fines and violations or an extensive list of workplace injuries.

Emergency planning: we talk about it, but are we really trained, prepared, and ready to respond? Admittedly, we have many other tasks to manage. Training for emergencies takes time, effort, and resources most companies don’t want to allocate. When chaos ensues, who are you going to call? The plant manager, the human resources manager, the utility foreman, or perhaps that safety professional that you decided not to hire?

The bottom line: what does it really mean if you don’t have a safety program? Safety isn’t a cost but an investment that actually creates financial benefits. When we talk about the bottom line, we also must account for the value of your employees’ lives and the effects on their families, your company, and the community.

How can you assign a dollar value to your employees’ lives? Every day, you expose your employees to unsafe conditions within your workplace; that is exactly what you’re doing. When you continue to put off equipment repairs and replacements, training, and safety infrastructure because you’ve been lucky so far and no one has been injured yet, you say a lot about the entire organization. You can’t put a price tag on an employee’s life—it’s priceless.

As a CEO, CFO, or HR manager, how many times have you really thought about how an employee’s injury or death will affect their family? If this has happened at your organization, when was the last time you thought about reaching out? Who is going to comfort them? How do they move forward? Yes, they’re going to get life insurance (you do provide life insurance for your employees, don’t you?) and possibly some assets, but that can’t bring back the person who tucked them in at night, watched them score their first goal, watched them play their first solo, or walked them down the aisle.

Safety must be a no-excuses core component of every job, every department, and every product. A commitment to safety says that you value your employees. A lack of same says you see them as expendable. Value your employees, and they will value you.

You can invest in safety or bear the costs of not doing so. Every injury, every fine, and every lawsuit minimizes the potential increase in your bottom line. Safety affects how other companies view you as a potential asset or liability.

Safety has a net positive ROI. It may not be seen daily in a monetary figure, but every employee who goes home safely after their shift represents money well invested. Treating your people with the same respect you expect brings an ROI that can’t be measured in dollars. Don’t gamble with the lives of your employees—invest in them. Invest in a seasoned safety professional with a diverse background who stands by principles and demonstrates integrity and sincerity with the way they communicate and treat every employee.