How Healthcare and Safety Improvements Can Improve Business Profits
Health and safety improvements often feel like an unnecessary expenditure, especially when it comes to the little things that often go unnoticed. And a lot of the time, it’s quite possible to just overlook the areas where improvements can be made. Here’s how health and safety improvements can actually be good for your business.
What are health and safety improvements?
Before we get into the good stuff, here’s a quick rundown of what the concept of health and safety improvements entail. Health and safety encompasses the idea of making the workplace as safe and productive as possible. From fire hydrants to smoke alarms, clean working environments, administrative measures and the overall prevention of occupational injuries and illnesses, health and safety improvements help ensure that workplaces are safe and structured for workers, clients, customers and communities alike.
Ensuring that health and safety improvements are effective
Company values, employee attitudes and workplace procedures all play a huge role in making health and safety improvements successful. Businesses will need to invest the proper time, finances and resources to ensure that policies are carried out in the correct manner and monitored for effectiveness afterwards.
Practical ways that health and safety improvements are good for a business:
- Efficiency: Structured administrative processes help ensure that long and tedious procedures are dealt with in an efficient – and effective – manner. For example, a safety improvement could be to introduce digital channels for reporting workplace incidents. The digital incident report forms should be easy to use and accessible to all workers, offering feedbacks or email updates once the incident report has been dealt with. This will reduce unnecessary paperwork and help make the process transparent and faster for all parties involved.
- Set expectations: When rules and guidelines are unclear, worker behaviour and performance can be negatively affected. Decision-making is often cloudy and slow, while misunderstandings and miscommunication are likely to increase and cause other problems. Health and safety improvements help set boundaries and limits to bad behaviours and dangerous workplace habits.
- Employee satisfaction: Health and safety improvements such as a flexible employee schedule are a great way to boost employee satisfaction. Honestly, what worker doesn’t appreciate health and safety measures that will make the workplace safer and more enjoyable? Positive health and safety improvements also help ensure that workers will be treated fairly and with respect. Plus, employee satisfaction will help retain employees over the long term.
- Increased productivity: When health and safety measures are introduced correctly, workplace injuries and sickness will be reduced. Employees will be less likely to take sick leave and the workplace will benefit from healthy and productive workers. Some good safety improvements include improving visibility, keeping floors clear of cables, carrying out repairs in a timely manner, cleaning the workplace and ensuring protective equipment is worn when necessary.
- Higher profits: Just as improved safety and health measures will increase worker productivity, profits are set to increase when breakages, spills and delays are reduced. As an extra bonus, workplace safety will also reduce insurance costs and premiums.
- Company reputation: People tend to like companies that treat their employees well. Treating workers well translates to happy workers who ensure that the business is kept running smoothly, customers are happier and ultimately, everyone wins.
- Social responsibility: There is an unspoken expectation for companies in today’s modern world to be socially responsible and sustainable. Socially responsible companies that take the time to improve health and safety measures create a bigger scope to make a positive difference beyond just the workplace.
“Directors must have an understanding of the role safety performance plays in the performance of their business. In accepting corporate responsibility for health and safety, directors need to be proactive in developing a positive safety culture for their workplace.
I believe the emergence of mobile safety technology is facilitating a positive safety culture, by allowing employees at all levels of an organisation to positively engage in health and safety via mobile devices.” according to David Rowland, Head of Marketing at Effective Software
Case examples:
There are many reputable companies out there who retain their good name by committing to constant health and safety improvements.
Google: Google takes health and safety very seriously and somehow, they’ve even managed to make it enjoyable. From entertainment to on-site gyms and free food and healthy snacks, there’s no limit to the effort that Google will do to keep employees happy, healthy and safe.
Lego: Lego prides itself on conducting fair business and behaving ethically in all manners. The Danish company has launched many environmental initiatives such as their Sustainable Materials Center, where research and development is continually done to find sustainable ways to continue making this fun and educational toy.
Texas Instruments: From worker safety to product quality assurance, Texas Instruments takes the time to keep their workplace safe and functional. They’ve even created their own standard of safety measures to assess the packaging for all Texas Instrument products.
Want to know more? Check out this list of the best global companies to work for and see how a commitment to positive health and safety improvements has helped make their businesses more successful.
