Why safety is Important?

So what can safety do for you?

The benefits of maintaining a safe work environment are many, but first and foremost, safety is about what you can do to protect your workers. “It’s the right thing to do. Employers should send their workers home in the same condition they came in. Why wouldn’t that be important to a company?” says Todd Detro, vice president of Safety Management Group’s owner services team.

But the practice of safety also brings financial benefits to the table. A safe work environment impacts a project’s bottom line both directly and indirectly. Costs associated with incidents, including lost costs, worker’s comp claims, insurance costs and legal fees are minimized in a safe work environment. So are the indirect costs that follow incidents, including the lost productivity that occurs when people turn their attention to dealing with an incident. “If you’re doing safety effectively in a business world, it’s going to relate to fewer schedule interruptions, which will minimize your costs,” says Mark Steinhofer, facilities lead safety advisor in Safety Management Group’s owner services team. “You’re not going to have to stop work because you run into a problem.”

On the flip side, a safe work environment boosts employee morale, which, in turn, increases productivity, efficiency and profit margins. “When people feel like they have a good, safe work environment, they feel like they can make a difference,” says Steinhofer. “There are fewer staff absences, less staff turnover and an improved quality of work.”

No one can argue with the fact that workplace safety is important, yet it’s often unintentionally overlooked, leaving workers and others on the job site exposed to risk. Safety Management Group’s trained safety advisors can identify unsafe acts and conditions and provide practical solutions for minimizing those risks. Additionally, Safety Management Group’s safety professionals can help clients to develop a culture of safety on their job sites. The on- or off-site training that Safety Management Group provides can equip all the members of a construction team with the tools they need to perform their job safely, whether they need basic safety training or project-specific safety training. “Everyone has a piece in the safety puzzle,” says Detro. “We want every person on that construction team to know what their roles are regarding safety—the project manager, the foreman, the superintendent, and the field worker all have a responsibility. We lay that out up front.”