Occupational 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.
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.
How to Ensure Workplace Safety with IoT
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.
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.
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 Occupational 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.
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.
