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Workplace safety was mostly considered a financial burden, but early adopters gained leverage in keeping their employees safe and continuing production during the pandemic. A “financial burden” has turned into an ROI item and a core business approach for keeping the companies’ operational reflexes flexible.
In other words, the recipe of the “occupational safety” now has different “ingredients” like other parts of the “new normal.” This is not just a pandemic adaptation of business; it is also an imminent shift to a newly emerged “occupational safety & health” definition. This definition, which refers to complying with the physical conditions for a safer work environment, has been initially related to the individual range so far.
However, as pandemic conditions have emerged, the “one for all” aspect became more critical from a broader perspective. Hence, how can we procure “occupational safety” at the workplace with the new pandemic environment’s added complexities?
Occupational Safety as a Business Opportunity
The way of ensuring occupational safety is now a hybrid model. Remote working is an option for most white-collar, but what if your business area is based on an industrial production line or includes on-site customer interaction like customer services, medical care, transportation, or other facilities? Your safety scenarios will have to evolve.
If you cannot manage proximity between your customers and employees, this inability will bring adverse outcomes to the top eventually. We mean, like a total lockdown of your business accompanied by an urge to search for alternative solutions to ensure business continuity in a financially challenging condition.
That is where the concept of digital transformation kicks in. A relatively low IoT investment without an infrastructure that could both give you a feel for whether you are ready for such transformation organizationally and operationally could be a viable way to strengthen and safeguard your business in the long run.
An example could be UWB RTLS (ultra-wideband real-time location) system that operates with simple badge tags that transmit and receive radio signals to calculate the distance between employees to enforce social distancing. This system requires none or minimal infrastructure to operate, but it is very useful for pandemic safety.
In the production line, especially in blue-collar workforce-oriented industries, your business may need other wide-range solutions for tracking people, assets, or processes.
Some of the companies which have production and/or storage operations on the industrial side like a warehouse, construction, manufacturing, mining have use cases in related tracking solutions. In this respect, precise location tracking applications provide safety at the workplace and lead to operational efficiency by providing a concise view of your facilities in real-time so you can make quick decisions based on data to keep your business competitive.
Basic Variables of ROI in a Pandemic Environment
According to some business owners, workplace safety investment is considered a “nice to have” objective that brings an extra business cost.
On the other hand, companies that trust enhancing processes, data-driven problem solving, evaluating risks to real-time data analysis perceive it as an opportunity to reduce costs in the overall process/budget.
Also, it turns into an optimization model for the whole workflow of an operation which enables maximum performance overutilization of sources with minimum manual efforts.
Before pandemic conditions, ROI was the easiest way to determine which range a company should afford infrastructural expenses for the medium or long term. However, the pandemic environment showed that companies that lack innovative technological business implementation face more considerable waste of resources unexpectedly in this respect.
Investment for business intelligence is not an old-style financial burden like building a production facility from zero points; it is just a relatively low-priced expense for keeping the efficiency at maximum level with providing operational safety alongside it.
A new form of "emotion & logic" couple for businesses: Occupational Safety & ROI
If we characterize Workplace Safety as the “emotional” part, the “logic” would be absolutely ROI. Let us have a look at the perfect combination of these two:
Safety practices do not mean labeling or spying on employees. On the contrary, it comes with a social responsibility perspective. These are the times of digital transformation and transformation into a human-centric approach for businesses.
ROI is the logical part and speaks on the “how much?” side. But with the new ROI point of view, another question comes to the agenda: “how can we ensure operational efficiency while accompanying workplace safety?”
All research and recent industrial know-how prove that ensuring occupational safety and ROI resembles two peas in a pod from now on.
What is the relation between Occupational Safety & ROI?
Ensuring occupational safety leads to ROI with these:
Corporate Social Responsibility
Ensuring the safety of employees, customers, and eventually the “public” is a primary duty for the organizations. This notion also introduces being compliant with the new safety rules & standards.
Saving Resources (Time & Money) & Increasing Operational Efficiency
Safer work environment reduces risks of injuries and incidents and reduces costs stemming from inefficient manual process maintenance and supporting productivity, growth, and sustainability.
Employer Branding Approach
Creating a work environment with the focus of keeping employees safe and comfortable is a positive outcome for recruitment in various areas.
