Safety and Employee Retention

Why it is Important to have a Safe Working Environment

Employees quit for a variety of reasons.  One of the leading causes for employee turnover is an unsafe working environment.   Safe working conditions are extremely important for care of your staff as well as significant cost savings.

Worker’s compensation claims quickly add up.  Unsafe working conditions can promote employee turnover costing a company a great deal of money.  Training a new employee increases overall cost and decreases productivity.  While keeping your productive employees is clearly one of the best solutions, how to retain them is not always so clear.

The primary way to increase employee retention is to “demonstrate a sincere sense of caring about employees and what is important to them. Managers can help employees refocus on the demands of their roles and on the skills, knowledge and talents they bring to their jobs” (Kimball).  For factory workers, there is no better way to allow for comfortable working conditions that to appeal to the most essential need of humans: safety.  There are a variety of precautions that must be met in order to create the safest working environment for your employees.  

The easiest, most effective and efficient way to reduce worker’s compensation cost is to be proactive in creating a safe working environment for you employees.  There are various aspects of safety to consider when evaluating new products and fixtures.

Slips and falls are one of costliest accidents for businesses, but they do not have to be.  There are several preventable measures a company can take in order to make their plant a safer working environment.  According to HSP Supply Inc, over 540,000 Slip-Fall injuries that require hospital care occur in North America each year.  A company can add railing to reduce the number of falls and use slip free surfaces to reduce the number of slips.

The cost of an injured worker extends far beyond the medical cost, lost wages, and higher insurance premiums.  In fact, the indirect costs are staggering.  The loss in production from the missing worker will quickly add up in terms of loss of inventory.  If you need to replace the injured worker, the cost of hiring a new employee is very costly between the paperwork and administrative cost, and the cost of training that new employee is yet another unexpected, indirect cost. Even with a replacement, the loss of experience and skill will slow production.  Injured workers tend to carry a loss in morale which will only end up costing the company more (Workers Compensation Fund).

The hidden costs make the direct cost just the tip of the iceberg.  Because of these high costs, it is obvious that the best solution is to create a safe working environment in order to avoid injuries all together, and there is no better place to start, but the bottom, yes, the floor.