According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), occupational injuries cost businesses about £14 billion annually. The surprising thing is that these calculations do not include the cost to the workforce and larger society. Businesses have to either take care of these costs or see them reduce their bottom lines substantially.
For this reason, business leaders have to do everything they can to reduce occupational injuries. Many businesses have benefited from hiring a health and safety consultancy firm to help reduce these costs and ensure they comply with safety regulations. In this article, though, we will focus on how health and safety consultants save businesses money.
They Reduce Overhead Costs
Businesses are liable for any injuries that their employees sustain while at work. This liability ensures workers are adequately compensated for their injuries and the wages they lost due to being unable to come to work.
Businesses can either cover these costs themselves or rely on worker’s compensation insurance to handle them. Regardless, the business pays for these injuries directly or through higher insurance premiums if they make numerous claims.
A health and safety consultancy firm helps businesses improve their safety through training, regular inspections, providing helpful advice, and providing safety guidelines and documentation businesses can use to keep their workers safe.
They Can Help Reduce Absenteeism
Workers injured on the job will typically take a few days off to recover. We already know businesses must pay them for these days unless they want to get into a legal dispute. However, they also lose money through lost productivity.
If a business relies on a specific employee for a process to deliver products and services on time, they might see delays that cost them money due to the worker being injured. If businesses still want to deliver, they might consider expensive options such as paying workers overtime or hiring temporary workers to make up for the productivity loss.
The bottom line is that they risk losing productivity but lose money if a key employee is injured.
By helping them reduce these incidences, health and safety consultants can save businesses a lot of money. In one case, such a firm saved a car manufacturer over £11 million in three years by reducing absenteeism associated with injuries by 1%.
Reduced Employee Turnover
No one wants to work in an unsafe workplace. This is why businesses with poor safety records have a very high turnover rate. Turnover is the number of people who leave the business within a specific period.
Hiring, onboarding and training new employees can get prohibitively expensive, especially if the business wants to hire highly skilled, qualified and experienced professionals.
By helping reduce safety levels, reducing injury incidents, and improving worker retention, health and safety consultants can ensure businesses do not have to incur the expenses associated with hiring and getting new employees up to speed.
While businesses cannot ignore the human element when it comes to workplace injuries, they also cannot ignore the costs associated with these incidents. Keeping these costs low entails improving their safety records, which is something health and safety consultants can help them do.
