Workplace injuries can greatly impact your business on a variety of fronts. In addition to having the potential of being incredibly costly, a workplace injury can also have a severely negative impact on worker morale. When your employees are not able to view your business as a safe place to work, they are likely to become anxious. They may have fears about coming to work and may look for other opportunities elsewhere.
Financial Costs
Workplace injuries can have a profoundly harmful impact on the financial standing of a business. There are many factors that come into play when determining how much a workplace injury could set your company back. Some of the main things to take into consideration when attempting to protect your company from expensive workplace injuries are:
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines
- Medical compensation
- Legal costs
- Accident investigation
- Lost production
- Training new staff
OSHA Guidelines
Throughout the United States, OSHA has specific guidelines in place to protect workers from harm. Employers are required to meet the standards laid out under these guidelines to ensure a safe work environment for employees. Failure to meet these guidelines can bring heavy fines upon a company, especially in the event of an employee getting injured as a result of the failure by the company.
Following OSHA guidelines and creating a safe workplace protects a company against the fines they may receive from this body. Additionally, it helps to ensure that fewer workplace injuries occur in the first place. Obviously, the best way to avoid financial hardship associated with injuries in the workplace is to prevent those injuries from ever occurring.
Medical Compensation
When a worker gets injured on the job, they have the right to file a claim for workers’ compensation. Source: https://www.sinklaw.com/areas-we-serve/georgia/work-injuries-lawyer/
An employer’s workers’ compensation insurance will pay for the worker’s injury, as well as any lost wages due to time missed from work. While this insurance protects the company from more significant financial damages, more injury claims mean higher insurance rates for the company.
Legal Costs
When an employee has a claim which goes beyond the level of coverage carried by an employer, then lawyers will have to get involved. Even if a company is able to resolve the claim without going to court, there are still going to be plenty of associated legal fees.
Accident Investigation
When an accident occurs, it needs to be investigated, and an accurate record of events must be kept. This is important for a company to do in any case, and the associated cost could end up saving the company money if the investigation shows that the claim is fraudulent.
Lost Production
In addition to all of these costs, the loss of your employee for however long their injury keeps them out of work can be quite costly to your business. Not only will productivity drop due to the loss of an employee, but productivity will decline across the board as other employees pick up the tasks of the injured employee, leaving them with less time to complete their own work.
Training New Staff
When the injured employee is due to missing an excessive amount of time, an employer may be forced to hire additional staff to help until their return. The costs of bringing on a new employee can be significant. For filling vacancies that require little training, the expense might not be too severe. However, if the job requires a lengthy training period, then it can cost a business a vast sum.
Not only will other employees continue to have to cover the work of the missing employee until the training process is complete, but they will also have to cover some of the work for the employee doing the training. They will be pulled away from their regular duties to get the new hire up to speed and will not be able to carry their usual workload.
Accidents Happen
Unfortunately, even if you do everything to provide a safe workspace for your employees, accidents will still happen. There is no way to fully ensure that an employee will not suffer an injury while on the job. Still, many steps can be taken to minimize the likelihood of this event.
Making your workplace as safe as possible will also increase morale. An unnecessarily dangerous work environment will make employees anxious and uncomfortable at work and lead to high turnover. When employees see that their employer is doing everything to ensure their safety, they will be far more satisfied and less likely to seek to leave the company.
