How an Injury Can Affect Your Business
Many businesses worldwide suffer from the same problem, absenteeism. Accidents or injuries that happen at work or offsite cause corporations millions of dollars in sick pay and lost work hours. Business leaders need to be aware of the implications of this and have in place some form of an action plan to allow for it.
Offsite Injuries
Accidents that happen away from the workplace are one of the major causes of sick leave in the country. The seriousness of the incident determines the full loss to the company. A common cold or minor injury means only a few days of leave. However, something more significant is where the trouble starts.
Financial
Sick leave affects the business in two ways. Firstly there’s a financial burden. The employee is being paid their salary but not doing any work. If the work must be completed, then the business is paying additional staff for these tasks. This ‘double-paying’ means that basically two times the money is being spent on the one outcome.
Workflow
The second way this affects the organization is the interruption to the workload. This is compounded if the tasks are too specific to be farmed out to other workers, or if there are urgent deadlines that look impossible to meet. Engaging the services of a physiotherapist can help keep workers healthy, reducing the chances of such interruptions.
Onsite Injuries
Far more concerning for many business owners are onsite accidents. Statistics show that every 7 seconds, someone is injured at a workplace. These cause a lot of headaches for many people.
Building Sites
If the business premises are a building site, onsite injuries are often recorded on a noticeboard outside the development zone. This type of information tells the general public just how safe (or unsafe) this area is. Photographs and stories on social media are the kind of negative publicity many corporations seek to avoid.
Legal Issues
The other issue for corporations, where the accident is onsite, is the legal ramifications. Employees can sue for damages. Learn more about what the implications are to your business from this type of court action.
Action Plan
Savvy managers allow for accidents and injuries by having an action plan in place. This plan will provide additional resources to be made available. Alternatively, a redistribution of the workload could solve the issue, short term. The action plan should also take into account any negative publicity or legal issues that could arise from onsite incidents and how to manage those.
Unfortunately, accidents will happen, on and off the premises, by preparing in advance for this, the impact to the company should be kept to a minimum.
