If you asked a hundred people what the primary benefit of safety training is, you’d likely hear the same answer a hundred times: preventing injuries and saving lives. After all, there is a massive and obvious need to keep people safe.
There are many reasons for this unanimity, starting with a moral imperative: keeping people alive and healthy is just the right thing to do. But there are also financial benefits to protecting your people. Over half of injuries involve “days away from work, job transfer, or restriction”, according to Insurance Journal, and there’s a real cost to these disruptions to the workforce. It’s also long been noted that the level of workplace compensation claims can have a massive impact on an organization’s bottom line. A safety program that effectively reduces injuries can be a net positive contributor to company profits.
While saving lives and reducing injury-related expenses are the two clearest positive outcomes of safety, they’re hardly the only ones, and the benefits of training reverberate far beyond incident rates and insurance claims. Here are three commonly overlooked benefits of quality safety training initiatives.
Employee engagement
Every employer is happy when a shift ends without an injury. But do you know who really likes a day without an incident? The employees themselves.
When people see injuries happening around them, or when they experience an injury, it can be a massive de-motivator. After all, who would feel enthusiastic about working in a setting that appears to be dangerous? The opposite is also true. When employees feel like their workplace is a safe one, they’re more likely to be engaged in their day-to-day tasks.
Safety is one of the primary ways that companies can demonstrate a high degree of care for their employees. And that sense of care is often reciprocated when employees are more attentive in their daily tasks and more engaged in the workplace.
Employee engagement can also generate a positive feedback loop. As safety researcher Rodd Wagner notes, “Safety is one of the most reliable outcomes of employee engagement … Happy employees are better at keeping themselves and their colleagues out of harm’s way for reasons both conscious and subconscious.”
Safety can be used to make employees more engaged and happy. And employees who are engaged and happy will be more attentive and even safer. It’s a safety-engagement cycle that EHS directors dream of. And it all starts with effective safety training.
Stronger culture
It’s widely believed that a strong safety culture can have a positive impact on safety outcomes—and that’s backed up by a significant library of research on the relationship between safety culture and safety performance. But it’s worth noting that, just like we saw with employee engagement and safety outcomes, the connection between safety and culture is a two-way street. EHS professionals can use this to their advantage.
As a recent white paper on safety climate notes, small safety initiatives can be a catalyst for wider cultural change, with the paper noting that “creating improved safety and communication on a small scale within teams and departments can perhaps counterintuitively lead to faster and more sustainable gains [in organizational culture].” And so while many people think that safety is influenced by culture—and it often is—it can function the other way, too.
Culture isn’t something that shifts overnight. Instead, it works like compound interest, slowly but steadily accumulating over time. An initial safety deposit can seem small but—allowed to compound over time and, hopefully, with additional deposits down the road—it can amount to a sizeable culture shift.
Safety columnist Ray Prest argues in Occupational Health and Safety magazine that safety culture is “the result of established procedures and processes, the efficacy of training plans, the strengths and weaknesses of supervisors as well as the individual abilities and mental states of a whole bunch of workers, plus many other factors. It’s a classic example of the sum being equal to the parts, and then some.”
Improving the efficacy of training plans can lead to a stronger culture. And that, in turn, can pay safety dividends for years to come.
Cost savings from the frontline to the HR department
Injuries are a lot more expensive than many people think. Yes, they can lead to costly workplace compensation claims, but there are many other indirect costs related to lost-time injuries. There is reduced productivity as seasoned employees are swapped out for inexperienced replacements. There is a negative impact on quality. Injuries also reduce employee engagement, which further reduces the speed and quality of employees’ work. High injury rates can also elevate worker turnover—and having to hire and train replacements is an expensive proposition.
The opposite is also true. Reducing injuries can improve workplace retention, improve the quality of production and improve engagement. These upgrades can lead to major financial savings. They can also lead to time savings in the HR department. With less hiring to do, fewer complaints to deal with and a downturn in compensation claims, human resources professionals will happily take note of the downstream effects of an effective safety initiative. The effect can be so pronounced that you may even be able to use these human resources benefits to help get buy-in for safety training and other EHS initiatives.
The big caveat about extra safety training benefits
Not all safety training offers these benefits. So before you start anticipating big savings, better engagement and a happier HR manager, make sure that you know whether you’re likely to see these additional perks of safety training.
Mandatory training is unlikely to move the dial on engagement or culture. Annual fire drills, forklift certifications and other required refresher sessions won’t work either. These types of training initiatives are often perceived by employees as check-the-box exercises and, after years, many workers will have become complacent with them.
Voluntary training is much more likely to reap these extra engagement, culture and cost benefits, especially if that training looks visually appealing and is designed with adult learning principles in mind. Having the safety training delivered by a professional safety consultant can also go a long way to getting more secondary value out of each session.
Well-crafted training will make a point of helping employees recognize how they personally benefit from the education sessions and will give companies an easy way to demonstrate genuine care for their workforce. This is especially true for initiatives like human factors training that gives employees practical skills that boost their personal awareness. This type of training can also create a common language and lay the foundation for a stronger culture.
So the next time you’re considering a new safety implementation, take some time to chat with the training provider not only about injury reduction but about secondary benefits like engagement, culture, financial savings and even a positive impact on HR. Choose the right program and you’ll be sure to see the positive changes that can take hold when you put safety first.