In part one, we went over the basics of a report by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration detailing some of the broader aspects of responsibility for businesses to provide comprehensive safety for workers. Let’s go a little deeper into what this means, and look at the real costs for both companies and individual front-line workers, to understand the real value of workplace safety.

Relationship-Based Costs

Many business people and others tend to think of work injury costs as strictly a line-item set of costs — costs for medical bills, costs for worker’s compensation insurance, and the actual monetary amounts that change hands during care and recovery. But these are not the only costs of work accident injuries, as experienced injury attorneys and others know well. These extra costs may not be factored into the types of receivables that companies deal with in resolving a work injury, but they are still very relevant to what happens when companies fail to protect their employees.

Personal Effects of Work Injury

A particular part of the OSHA study shows how individual low-income workers and other front-line employees can suffer after being harmed in the workplace, stating: “There are also less tangible effects that are important but impossible to monetize.”

Some of these include elements pointed out in this study, such as:

• lower self-esteem and self-confidence
• stress within the family unit
• impaired relationships with friends and colleagues
• strain on spousal relationships

The report further suggests that these kinds of problems can result in lower wages over the remainder of the individual’s career. These are the types of personal effects that injury lawyers point to as parts of a ‘pain and suffering’ or auxiliary award for a workplace injury.

Reputation: Effects for the Business

Just as the injured worker has to deal with the actual day-to-day of recovery, the business has to deal with the aftermath of a workplace injury in various ways. The company will be paying more in terms of insurance, or otherwise paying out to cover injury costs, but that’s not the only reason that smart managers make safety a number one priority.

In today’s competitive work world, as companies, government agencies and other parties put more and more of a premium on safety, comprehensive safety becomes a very valuable element of the company’s reputation. This has led to prominent displays on the work floor, online and elsewhere about the company’s “number of days without injury” or some other benchmarking numbers showing a dedication to safety and a history of safety on the job.

By the same token, when a workplace injury occurs, much of that reputation goes down the drain, and that business struggles with a perception that it has become an unsafe place to work. This loss of reputation can be compounded by any suggestions that the injury occurred because of insufficient safety guidelines, or because safety guidelines were not followed. Companies are often left scrambling to reorient themselves and come back, in terms of reputation, from a workplace accident.

For more on employee safety and much more, keep an eye on the Full Steam Staffing blog. We will continue to address this issue in part three of our blog series, in addition to other topics that we cover as a trusted staffing service in the Ontario, California area.