Consider that an employee seriously got burned such that they needed immediate attention.
Others in that area would need to respond, taking them away from their normal jobs, and thus either slowing production or grinding it to a halt.
The employee may need first aid, medical attention, transportation to medical facilities and the like.
There is also the need of reporting the accident and investigating it. That takes time away from production as well.
All the described activities take labour and some resources away from the business and put it towards something that generally should not happen — not to mention the fact that a person was burned badly enough to need medical attention!
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The costs do not stop there. Oftentimes with workers compensation, there is a deductible to pay, which means that up to a certain amount, a company is coming out of pocket for that injury.
If the employee can come back to work, they may not be able to perform their full duties, lowering overall productivity.
Do you see how one serious injury can snowball? And we did not even cover possible legal and regulatory ramifications.
We know that not tending to safety can greatly affect operational costs. So, how do you tend to safety properly?
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Well, if you have a sufficiently old facility or process, without full safety designed in at initial construction and implementation, organisations are presented with two major choices: replace the equipment with more up-to-date models, complete with applicable safety features and design or upgrade and update the existing equipment.
It is often far less expensive to add safety features to equipment and facilities rather than buy a new piece of equipment.
Depending on the type of industry, it just does not make practical sense to buy a new piece of equipment due to the extremely high upfront cost.
This can seem to be the most desirable option because of the lower upfront cost of updating a piece of equipment.
But remember, most machines are quite complicated and modifications are not as straightforward as they seem.
Older equipment and processes are often less automated and streamlined and more reliant on the manual labour or action of employees.
When safety is being improved through a more add-on approach, a major deterrent to it working correctly is the strongly competing priorities of production and safety.
For instance, when processes that previously have little in the way of safety are improved through the add-on approach, there literally is more to do. But did the required production numbers get lowered by management? Probably not.
This means that however strapped a business might have been to produce before are magnified by the addition of safety. Well, this is likely the case in the beginning, at least.
There is a learning curve to doing things safely, correctly and expeditiously. A business will likely find that as they learn the best ways to do things with what they have, that they do not lose much time in their overall operations.
But that does not mean they do not feel it in the short term. If this is not accounted for, employees often will do what the company emphasises most.
Remember why a company is in business, after all!
To properly add safety to existing processes, there will be a need for understanding from upper management on what is needed and an estimate on the time to get everyone up to speed and back to near-normal production levels.
All the considerations mentioned before must be accounted for by upper management and allowance made in the short term for a given business unit to learn.
This may mean redirecting some business in the short term so that the company’s needs are still being met. If this is not done, it will encourage people to take shortcuts when they think no one is paying attention.
Employees often want to keep their jobs and if a business pays more attention to production numbers than the overall big picture, employees are likely to catch on to this.
The company and its employees must be set up for success with a practical strategy to deal with safety culture and process improvements.
