Can You Put A Price on Safety?

Health and safety should always be a top priority in any workplace. At their core, every business wants their people to not only feel safe but behave safely when they come to work.

The safety of your employees is critical to the continued operation of your business. So, why are so many executives hesitant to implement a safety solution? The cost.

It’s an expensive investment that a budget-conscious management team might be keen to avoid. Many feel it’s safe to assume people can use their common sense, with safety measures better left unenforced. But there’s work health and safety legislation for a reason.

Beyond being a legal requirement, having appropriate work health and safety measures comes down to one thing: your people. Without them, your business doesn’t exist. Cost reducing measures at the expense of the safety of people should not be a risk your business is willing to take.

You can’t put a price on the life of your workers.

While the upfront cost of implementing safe practices in the workplace might cause hesitation, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

The Cost of Not Investing in Safety

So what happens if your business decides not to invest in workplace health and safety practices?

With your safety professionals overrun with paperwork, they often miss important face-to-face time with workers. Not able to be part of daily events like toolbox talks and pre-start meetings, there’s missed opportunity to drive safer outcomes.

Relegating safety verification to an arduous manual process can lead to a lack of consistency and missing crucial information, like expiring certifications. With the potential for untrained workers to be on your sites and projects, there’s an increased risk of workplace injuries which is costly.

According to Safe Work Australia, the cost of work-related injury and disease to the Australian economy is $61.8 billion. Businesses often lose more money due to work-related injury than they would have spent implementing a comprehensive safety solution.

There’s the direct costs to your business, such as workers compensation, and fines and penalties for not meeting safety legislation. There are also indirect costs, including the loss of productivity, current and future earnings, the loss of potential output, knowledge, and skill.

Then there is the loss of time when a worker sustains an injury in the workplace. Safe Work Australia estimates an average of five weeks’ time lost as a result of a serious injury claim.

The Benefits of Investing in Safety

When you implement a workforce management solution, like the Pegasus platform, you transform safety from cost to an investment.

One of the first things your business will notice is a reduction in administrative work. With your workers able to upload their qualifications, insurances, and documents into the Pegasus platform, it frees your safety people from the burden of paperwork. Our client Patrick Terminals have seen the benefit of this.

“This allows our HSE Managers, and Facilities and Procurement Managers to spend more time with our contractors, to be part of toolbox talks and pre-start meetings in order to drive safer outcomes,” said Ben Meikle, National HSE Manager – Systems and Projects at Patrick Terminals.

The collection and verification of documents such as insurances, licences, trade qualifications, and training certificates is time consuming, costly, and adds to the workload of your already busy safety and administrative staff.

After collecting these documents for you, Pegasus offers our expertise in verifying them against industry standards. This provides an independent and consistent approach to maintaining compliance. We even proactively engage your contractors before their information expires and they fall into non-compliance.

The result? Your safety and site resources are focused on more productive tasks while Pegasus engages and supports your contractors through onboarding and ongoing compliance.

The detailed data collected in your Pegasus solution provides your business with insight into areas of potential risk. Through creating role requirements, you can be certain your workforce is operating with high skill and reduced risk. These worker profiles are linked to Site Access, where only workers who meet your requirements are granted access to your sites and projects.

With your workforce trained and safety measures enforced, the true ROI is knowing you’ve done everything you can to ensure the safety of your workforce. And you can’t put a price on that.

Are you ready to transform safety from cost into an investment? Book a demo today.