There are several reasons why regular inspections are a good thing for a company. For starters, they were shown to reduce the risk of accident and injury by as much as 23%, as well as the cost reported to injuries by 26%. But aside from the obvious benefits, they also have some extra advantages that may or may not be immediately apparent.

Inspections aren’t, as some may believe, just another needless way to spend more of the company’s money. They are there to help prevent accidents that may otherwise hurt your business - and they can do so in more ways than one.

Be it a car crash with a company vehicle, an employee being injured on your company’s property, or even a pile of trash found somewhere that have your brand’s name written on it, all of these can have some indirect negative effects on your business in terms of lost capital, lost business opportunities, as well as a blow to your reputation.

Disruption

In the event of an accident, the first of these indirect consequences will present itself in the form a disruption in day-to-day operations. This disruption will also come from more than one place. For starters, if any equipment or machinery was damaged during the accident, it will need to be serviced, during which time, you’ll either have to make due or find a replacement.

If an employee gets injured, or worse, they will have to go to the hospital and you’ll most likely need to find a replacement. Depending on the nature of your business, the hiring process can take from 12.7 to as much as 49 days, on average. You will also have to take into account the time needed to properly train that person, which can add at least several more days to the whole process.

Depending on the severity of the accident, you should not rule out the possibility of loss in morale among your employees, especially if someone was injured. Though this will not be as ‘visible’ as the others, this disruption will probably end up affecting you the most. Employee morale is strongly linked to productivity and there’s a reason why so many top companies give it so much attention, after all. 

Financial Losses

All of the aforementioned disruption, obviously, have their own price tags attached to them. But among the other direct costs that usually follow a workplace accident involve things like medical costs, employee compensation, insurance premiums and deductibles, death, permanent disability, sick pay, damages to equipment, machinery, or building, government fees, legal fees.

Then, there are the more indirect costs that people don’t usually consider prior to an accident. These include things like loss of talent, the cost of hiring and training, overtime to cover the shifts of the injured worker, lower morale, extra supervisory time, increased premiums, cancelled contracts, change in incident rates, Enterprise Rate Modifier (ERM), etc. Depending on the severity of the accident, these hidden costs can run anywhere from 4 to 10 times the amount of direct costs.

Reputation

Big and moderate accidents can and will hurt your brand’s reputation. If an employee get seriously injured or dies, chances are that your business will make the local news. The same thing can be said about poor waste management. If your brand has some national and/or international notoriety, then you’ll probably make it on the national and international news.

Negative publicity almost always leads to fewer sales, fewer business contracts with potential partners, often times resulting in your sock price going down. Just look at Tesla and how its stock dropped to its lowest in nearly a year after a fatal crash with one of its cars. 

Takeaway

After seeing how your brand can be affected by accidents, it becomes immediately clear that preventive measures are key. Regular health and safety inspections are a great way of doing that and a cloud-based software such as The Checker Pro will greatly increase their effectiveness. For more information about The Checker Pro, feel free to visit our website or email us at info@thechecker.net.