How to fast-track your journey to health and safety ROI

How much does an ‘on the job’ accident cost? For starters, there are the direct costs, which include medical expenses for the injured worker, workers' compensation payments, medical expenses, and costs for legal services. Accidents also have indirect costs, and when they are added to the direct costs, the total outlays can be crippling.

Health and safety technology, especially applications and software, can help your organisation identify trends and problems before they become costly accidents. However, if your company is on a tight budget, upfront investment in technology might just seem to be too much when added to insurance premiums, expenditures required for regulatory compliance, and so on. This blog will share how adopting health and safety technology can transform your journey to achieving a faster ROI on safety.

Why investing in safety makes sense (and cents!)

Many organisations want to decrease costs. As previously mentioned, every workplace incident has direct and indirect costs. The list of indirect costs for an accident is long:

• Time lost from work by the injured employee or employees
• Loss in earning power
• Time and efficiency lost by other employees and supervisors as they covered for the injured and a crew was broken up
• Time and expense of recruiting and training a new worker
• Time and expense of replacing or fixing tools, equipment, and other property that were damaged or spoiled by fire, water, chemical, or explosives
• Spoiled work and production losses
• Failure to fill orders
• Overhead while work was disrupted
• Mental health issues that cause absenteeism or affect productivity, such as PTSD or anxiety
  
  

These indirect costs are usually higher than direct costs. A conservative estimate is that for every £1 spent on direct accident costs, an additional £3 is spent on indirect costs. Some studies show that the hidden costs can be four to 10 times the costs. There’s good news, however. According to research from ASSP, every £1 invested in safety saves a company at least £3 by preventing injury, lost work, and administrative work. By making the same kind of investments in safety that are made for other parts of the business, your organisation will see a significant ROI.

How technology can help

If you can demonstrate to business leaders and financial decision-makers how improving safety performance through technology can reduce cost, you will also have solid evidence that more resources should be allocated to your health and safety program. Assure is SHE Software’s health and safety management platform. It channels decades of safety and technology experience into versatile, easy to use software that generates insights and adapts to your changing health and safety needs.

Focus on leading indicators for improved your safety performance

Report more on leading indicators (hazards, near misses, observations, safety tours, audits and check) so that actions and processes can be put in place to prevent serious accidents. Make it easier for employees to report and get engage in health & safety. Improving safety performance leads to less serious accidents costing business significant amounts of money.

Not only does Assure help demonstrate your duty of care and deliver better safety solutions, but it also reduces the financial burden of incidents and claims, all while supporting health and safety decisions that are well informed and fact-based. Now available with a mobile web application, Assure also has new functionality that can help your organisation achieve a faster ROI.

Using the latest in mobile technology for driving engagement

AssureGO+ is designed as a progressive web application (PWA). PWAs take advantage of the latest technologies to combine the best of web and mobile apps. Delivered through the web, they work on most platforms that use a standards-compliant browser, including desktop and mobile devices. On a smartphone, they behave almost entirely like native applications and offer offline access, audio and video capture, full-screen, touch gestures, and more. Unlike native applications, they do not have to be downloaded to your mobile device. A link quickly opens the app, bypassing app stores altogether.

Because AssureGO+ is designed as progressive web app, it increases efficiency and streamlines the ability of an organisation to engage in safety while decreasing risk. Employees can access it faster, from almost everywhere, without waiting for it to download, which increases engagement—an important ingredient of a world-class health and safety program.

Geolocation for enhancing reporting and data

Reporting the accurate location of your Incident or hazard can be critical, even when your employees are working in locations that are not easily identifiable by an address or facility. Assure offers the capability to enable a map to set the current location when reporting and displaying these locations on an interactive map in Assure Insight+ dashboards.

As a result, you can reduce time and costs of health and safety processes because it is easier for your workforce to set accurate location information when reporting an incident or hazard, and quicker to follow up and correct unsafe situations in the right locations. The display in Insights+ dashboards also makes it easier for your organisation to understanding trends and derive insights from location data that can prevent future incidents and reduce costs.

IQ templates for speeding up implementation

Fast implementation based on best practices is one of the best ways to achieve safety ROI. That’s why we have developed a library of pre-configured templates based on best practices and legislative guidance that you can use with Assure and AssureGO+ to help you develop and improve your existing health and safety management.

With these templates, you can save time. You can start quickly and easily, while avoiding reinventing the wheel or building from scratch. You can also engage more people in any location in a wider range of activities because much of the work has been done for you. With more people carrying out more activities, a flow of data will be created that can be simply visualized in dashboards, supporting effective management and strategic decision-making. You can also assess and demonstrate compliance to the wider business more quickly. All of this adds up to a significant ROI.

Ready to demonstrate ROI and fast-track your health and safety journey?

We’re ready to help you.