Valuing Your Employees' Safety Should Be Priority #1

Valuing your employees' safety should be the number one priority of every business.The reasons behind valuing employee safety range from the mundane concerns about lawsuits, productivity and insurance premiums to the more humanitarian idea that employees are people and as such deserve the respect and treatment that does a soul good.Empathy is a great quality to practice even when it negatively affects the bottom line.

Safe employees are productive employees.It is very hard for someone in the hospital to do work for most companies.Lost work time not only relates to the employee that was hurt, but to other employees who may have been involved or witnessed the accident.That type of stress can manifest itself in a downturn in productivity even without the added pressure of trying to pick up a job to cover for the injured person or trying to train a new person in that job.By reducing the number of accidents that a business has, it is really protecting itself from unexpected economic downturn that a major accident could cause.

When an employee gets hurt, you can be sure that an ambulance chaser will be on the scene to find out what happened, and if that lawyer gets wind that the company could have done something to protect its employees, there will be a lawsuit.The thing about lawsuits is that they do not have to go to court to be lucrative for the lawyer and the employee involved, and if the attorney can persuade the employee that the company will settle out of court, the employee will be more likely to sue.Even if the insurance company provides protection against lawsuits, those insurance premiums will go up.

Those aren't the only insurance problems that the company may have to face when it comes to injury or death of employees on the job.Workman's compensation premiums will also increase with the injury, and they may send over an investigator to find out what went wrong with the safety protocols and why the protocols did not protect the employee.Depending on what they find, they could call in OSHA who could levy fines or make new regulations based on who was at fault and who wasn't doing the right thing.
Of course, for a company that runs on a set of rules, the idea that people are more than resources never crosses its mind - because companies do not have minds.It may, however, cross the minds of the people that run the company.The management team of a company is the only one that can make the decision to comfort the employee and review safety rules with everyone else.While this should be done on a regular basis and is best done before something happens, most companies wait until something happens to one of its employees before implementing a review of procedures.By that time, it is too late for at least one person and for the morale of the people that person was involved with.

Safety issues should always be dealt with immediately and before anyone gets hurt.Management should know what the OSHA rules are and companies should strive to do more than the rules require.By keeping employees safe, companies will be able to show due diligence and management teams will be able to show that they care.We keep our children safe by telling them what they should and shouldn't do and them demonstrating why.Often times that approach cannot work in a business.But a business can be sure to provide reminders and walk the walk when it comes to safety protocols.