Making sure the safety of your work site is important—not just for your workers, but for your project’s financial health as well. Taking a lackadaisical approach to safety has real costs that can make your project needlessly expensive. Of course we don’t want to increase costs—but consider that cutting corners when it comes to safety can also cost you in the end.
Establishing Safety in both Planning and Best Practices
By making sure to take a proactive approach in risk minimization at the outset of a project, the project manager’s task is made simpler by separating out areas of potential safety concern and diversifying that responsibility across management. By doing this and ensuring that your management team understands safety concerns, you ensure that your team is able to act when potential trouble spots arrive for easier and faster resolution.
Establishing a set of best practices to ensure compliance with local and national safety guidelines at the outset of the project will reduce the overall risk of breaking protocol later at the expense of decreased safety.
Making Sure that Safety Goes Through the Chain of Command
If you don’t have safety management already in place, it’s a good idea to establish a team with the sufficient OSHA HAZWAPER training to ensure full compliance with workplace safety guidelines. Also, if you haven’t considered it yet, bringing in outside help is probably the smartest idea, to ensure compliance as well as efficiently get the project off the ground safely. A professional safety management team will work at the earliest stages of the project through to implementation to ensure that all phases of the project run as smoothly and safely as possible.
Workplace Safety Costs
While it may seem much cheaper to not follow safety guidelines, the numbers don’t lie: workers compensation costs total $1 billion a week in the United States. And injuries in construction, according to OSHA, are more expensive overall than other injuries. It may look cheaper to cut corners on safety, but besides the fact that being insensitive to your workers under the pretense of bringing costs down, the disappointing reality is that an unsafe workplace is actually more expensive to maintain in terms of lost time, worker claims, and retraining in the most severe cases where a worker needs to be displaced. By having a safety management team in place, you can substantially reduce the costs associated with accidents by reducing their occurrence altogether, which will save you time and keep your project running smoothly.
Hiring Safety Professionals to Ensure a Safer Work Site
Once again, if there isn’t a safety management team in place for your project, it’s a good idea to consider bringing in safety and management specialists already trained to help the implementation of your project from the get-go. By making sure you have your safety guidelines and uniform best practices in place, you do not only improve your bottom line by improving efficiency but also minimizing costs and risks associated with on-the-job injuries.