The impact of work-related Injuries and illnesses can be severe and costly to everyone. Calculating an accurate estimate of work-related incidents is challenging for many reasons. While wage replacement and medical costs can be measured directly, others such as a family’s pain and suffering are impossible to quantify.
OSHA estimated that employers pay almost $1 billion per week for workers compensation cost alone.1 This figure includes direct and indirect cost. Direct cost includes compensation payments, medical expenses, and cost for legal services. Indirect cost includes training replacement employees, accident investigation and implementation of corrective measures, lost productivity, equipment and property repairs, and cost associated with lower employee morale and absenteeism.
How Much Does a Work-Related Injury Cost?
Employees are one of your greatest assets and investments. Your employees possess the expertise, something you have paid for, and is essential to a productive workforce. An injured employee takes their value with them while you pay for their care and time away from work. You also have additional expenses for training and paying someone new to fulfill the vacant position.
Imagine you’re the owner of a large manufacturing company. In 2017, the leading type of injury in the manufacturing industry was sprains, strains, and tears.2 If you had three employees reporting a sprain, the direct cost would be $92,374 with indirect costs of $101,631, giving you a total claim cost of $194,025. At a 10% profit margin, you would need $1.9 million in additional sales to cover the total cost.3
Even if a company has appropriate workplace safety precautions in place, accidents can happen. However, preparing and responding to accidents can make a difference in achieving the best possible outcome.
Reduce Risk to Protect Your Employees and Your Bottom Line
One way to prevent accidents is to create a workplace safety culture. A safety culture determines how workplace safety is managed and valued. A safety culture consists of shared attitudes, beliefs, and values among employees to put safety first on the job. Creating a safety culture within your organization can prevent fatalities and reduce injuries resulting in lost days on the job, which will minimize adverse effects on productivity and ultimately, your bottom line.
While OSHA may set the foundation for a successful safety program, we believe there is a science to construction safety. Anova’s Safety Program is people focused and protection driven. Construction safety is as much about human behavior as it is about policy, auditing, and training. We recognize every organization or project has unique safety challenges. We strive to understand those challenges and provide Owners with the tools needed to reach their goals. The following are ways Anova can assist you in creating or improving the safety culture within your business:
- Gap Assessment
The Gap Analysis process helps Owners understand and prioritize their safety needs by identifying and remediating any deficiencies or shortcomings in their existing safety program. By uncovering gaps, it is easier to quantify them, prioritize them, and identify the effort required to address them. The analysis allows you to quickly diagnose problems and create solutions through fundamental changes in your business strategy or systems.Performing a Gap Analysis will provide decision makers with a comprehensive overview of their organization or project’s safety. By measuring the actual performance of the current safety program with the potential or desired performance, enables organizations to focus its efforts and make informed decisions. We will benchmark your performance and report on any remedial actions to reach your desired outcomes.
- Project Safety Management
Anova’s Safety Management program provides a designated safety expert to give advice and training regarding the safety of your project. We develop a safety program based on the Owner’s specifications in parallel with OSHA and industry standards so that we can manage and measure performance based on the established criteria. We communicate the program and expectations to all contractors and subcontractors and ensure compliance with the program. Our safety experts monitor and manage the day-to-day recording of safety data, which is analyzed for trends, both negative and positive. These analytics are then used to develop solutions to improve safety and mitigate negative trends and future safety failures. Anova’s approach to safety is not simply to manage problems after they happen but to understand how to identify adverse conditions so that accidents may be avoided. This can come in the form of training, corrective action, or simple communication. - Owner Safety Specification
Anova’s safety experts can write safety specifications tailored to the Owner’s requirements for any given project. We are experienced in capturing the Owner’s processes, requirements, discipline, and communication needs in the form of a specification that can be included in all project bid packages. This allows all contractors and providers to be contractually obligated to follow the safety requirements for the job and removes any ambiguity related to the Owner’s safety program. - Owner Safety Program
Anova is experienced helping owners with their safety program either from a Corporate perspective or project specific. We can write programs from scratch or evaluate existing programs and conduct a gap assessment to Identify areas that could be improved. - Awareness Campaigns
Anova offers creative services to specifically address the complex safety challenges our clients face every day. We pull from the knowledge and understanding we’ve established with our clients about their business and culture, to deliver programs and initiatives that connect with their workforce in a way that serves to inspire and influence, not just inform and enforce. Whether a client needs a new safety program or has a targeted safety initiative they want taken to the next level, Anova will employ issue-specific research, collaborative ideation and concept development to deliver communication and engagement tools that produce results.
Citations:
- https://www.osha.gov/dcsp/products/topics/businesscase/costs.html
- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/osh_11082018.pdf
- https://www.osha.gov/dcsp/smallbusiness/safetypays/estimator.html
