The Cost of Safety

In Canada, there are 3 workplace deaths every day and 1 in 64 workers hurt on the job every year. There is no argument that workplace injuries are a devastating mental and emotional event, but what are the high costs of workplace injuries for the employer?

Studies show that workplace injuries and illnesses cost the nation $20 billion every year. How are these costs calculated and how do they affect you the employer?

Direct Costs

Medical Costs
- Doctors’ visits, treatment, surgeries, etc.
Indemnity Costs
- 2/3 wages up to a set amount weekly
Medical
- 100% of the medical – doctor, office visit/hospital, X-ray/MRI, prescription drugs, physical therapy, home nurse, etc.
- Indemnity
Percentage of weekly wage (varies)
Permanent and partial disability
Death benefits
- Expenses
Legal
Claim processing/handling charges

Indirect Costs

Pain and suffering of employee
Loss of production
Customer “quality issues” and loss of business
Overtime costs
Equipment or product damage
Recruiting and retraining
Time
Damage to equipment
Interruptions in productivity
Injured employees
Employee morale
Customer Service

Direct Costs + Indirect Costs = Total Costs

To calculate how the total cost of injury affects profitability you calculate how much money in sales your company must generate to make up for these losses.

Calculate your company’s profit margin by dividing its total profits by total sales, and then divide the total cost of an injury or illness by your company’s profit margin.

Using this formula a claim of $4,000 would require a company with a profit margin of 5 percent to sell $208,000 worth of product to make up for the losses. A $100,000 claim would take $4.2 million in sales to make up the loss.

As you can see, there is so much more to workplace incident costs than just workers compensation. Building a culture of safety in your organization is the best way to ensure the reduction of workplace injuries and the costs associated.

Western Industrial Solutions built TaskSafe to save you money time – but more importantly – to protect lives.

Can You Make Money with Safety?

Yes, you can!

Safety paperwork is an integral, yet time consuming part of field work and you may be familiar with the old adage that “Time is money”.

TaskSafe not only saves lives, but it saves time, and that can have a serious impact on revenue.

For example, a company with 10 field workers is able to add a single job per day due to time savings on safety paperwork. If this job is valued at $200/job, the impact would result in increased revenues of $500,000 a year.

10 workers X $200 per job/per day
5 days per week X 50 weeks per year
Extra income is $500,000

This doesn’t even factor in the time and cost savings achieved through TaskSafe’s document management capabilities. No longer will you need to devote precious employee resources to handling, filing and tracking your safety documents.

The Cost of Safety - Western Industrial Solutions