When running a business (believe me, I know this firsthand), there are investments, and there are expenditures.

There are few things that are one or the other based on timing, but safety is one of those few things.

I have been advocating for years about being proactive when it comes to workplace safety. I promote it as a human being encouraging supervisors and administrators to treat their workers as humans and to protect them from themselves or others as the case may be. But of course, safety also has a significant financial footprint with it.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Alex Thomson via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Alex Thomson via a Creative Commons license]

And really, I don’t care whether your motives are compassionate or cash-conscious, as long as you have a safety program and make every effort to keep your workers safe and productive at work, I’m good with the result.

So let’s talk about safety and why timing is so important in terms of how it is classified.

Safety Timing

So why does time matter anyway? Think about a single incident – say, a person slipping on a banana peel and falling off a scaffold. Timing is everything; safety is an investment when someone removes that banana peel before the worker gets there; safety is an expense if that banana peel is removed after the incident occurred. How? The little bit of time to clear the path of hazards and risks of injury saves the company much more money than cleaning up the mess after an incident occurs.

Some safety measures may seem expensive to implement before an incident occurs, but those measures could essentially cost a lot more after a person is injured and the company pays thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in workers compensation and time to hire and train a new workers after an incident occurs.

OK, to be fair, those safety measures may not prevent all incidents from occurring, but they can certainly neutralize a lot of risk that the company would otherwise be taking on by not investing in those safety measures.

See it as insurance. Capice?

A Case in Point

Here is a perfect case study in the value of considering safety as an investment instead of an expense.

A small cabinet-marking company suffered when it made the decision not to spend about $7,500 to replace a non-functioning safety mat on a piece of running equipment. The company did take steps to inform workers about the safety mat not working, and developed signage and work-arounds so workers would remain safe while they were using the equipment.

But the problem wasn’t the workers who were working with the equipment; the problem was that the safety mat was designed to do more than protect equipment operators. One worker, who was not working on the equipment, slipped and tried to break his fall with his hand on this piece of equipment. After a broken wrist and skin that tore off the palm of his hand, the worker still suffers bouts of numbness in the hand and cannot lift heavy items like before the incident.

Remember, this company could have spent $7,500 on a safety mat replacement. The result of that lack of investment? A $75,000 fine by a court for an occupational safety and health (OSH) violation, and this doesn’t include the cost of the company to take care of the worker’s injuries and the loss or productivity. The initial investment might have saved at least 20 times the amount in expenses when everything was added together.

So the next time you are considering safety in your company and it involves spending some money on equipment or tools that will keep workers safe, would you spend $100 now to save $2,000 later?

Those with long-term thinking about their businesses know this answer.