Making Workplace Safety the Priority it Should Be
When it’s time for workplace safety trainings, you can expect many of your employees to roll their eyes. It’s a topic that is easy to dismiss, and if your workplace safety training content is less than engaging, the reaction is understandable. The problem, however, is that your company runs the risk of creating a workplace culture that fails to make safety a serious concern. That may not seem like a problem when everything is going along just fine, but all it takes is one serious accident or incident to put your company into a serious tailspin from which it can be very difficult to recover. Keep the following in mind when it comes to workplace safety:
Prioritizing Workplace Safety Sends a Positive Message to Employees
You might be surprised to find out that workplace safety is a serious concern for many of your employees, and probably for some of your best employees. If your company doesn’t make workplace safety a priority, those employees might not stick with your company. Take the case of a woman who had put in seven years of hard work at a property management company. When she expressed concerns about safety on the job, her concerns were ignored and treated like a joke by her manager. The woman ended up resigning (source). Your workers may still roll their eyes about workplace safety trainings, but if you don’t take the topic seriously and fail to show real concern for the safety of employees on the job, you run the risk of losing some of your best people. Send the right message to your employees by making workplace safety a top priority. Here are the top 50 OSHA Safety courses eLeaP recommends you have.
Workplace Safety by the Numbers
The statistics are more than sobering – they are mind-boggling. According to the National Safety Council (source), a worker is injured on the job every 7 seconds. This adds up to 510 workplace injuries per hour, 12,300 per day and an astounding 4,500,000 each and every year. And the impact of these injuries on companies is also very real, resulting in 104,000,000 missed days of work. The cost to your company is clear – lower productivity when employee injuries cause them to miss work. These are largely preventable injuries if companies would simply make workplace safety the priority it should be.
But the costs of poor workplace safety practices to your company can go far beyond lost productivity. While many workplace injuries will be covered by workers’ compensation insurance, this isn’t always the end of the story. If an injured employee can make the case that the injury was a direct result of employer negligence to worker safety, a lawsuit could be the result. Litigation is costly in and of itself, not to mention the potential settlement or judgement in favor of the injured employee. If the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) gets involved, your company might also face costly fines. In light of all this, can your company afford to not make workplace safety a top priority?
Learning and Training Content for Workplace Safety
The good news amidst all these sobering statistics is that your company doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to learning and training content related to workplace safety. There is plenty of existing content out there that will meet many if not all of your needs. The key, of course, is to make sure that the content is of a high quality. If workplace safety isn’t any more than the usual boring content that makes employees roll their eyes, you’re not doing them or your company any favors.
There will also be instances where learning and training content specific to the unique context of your company will need to be created. This company-specific content is much easier to develop and distribute when you have the right LMS (learning management system) supporting your efforts.
eLeap is a powerful and user-friendly LMS designed to help your company deliver learning and training content to employees through its web-based learning platform. In addition to the eLeaP LMS, we also provide access to a collection of ready-to-use learning and training video content, including workplace safety courses. Sign up for a free live demo of eLeaP or a 30-day free trial to see what eLeaP can do for your company.