Have you given much thought as to what could be the consequences if a serious health and safety accident or incident occurred in your company ?
Have you a plan in place ? Have you looked into how much the consequences could costs you ? What effects could your company feel ? How would you cope with the accompany loss of reputation, staff experience and morale ? How badly could your revenue and profits effected ? Would staff still want to work for you ? Customers will want to buy from you or work with you ?
As Safety Consultants concerned with occupational health and safety in the UAE, Corporate OHS have seen companies face the above situations far too many time.
Many companies have had to face exactly this scenario
And it has led to crippling financial hardship. Many still have gone out of business. These avoidable losses were sustained due to poor health and safety management of their workplace occupational health and safety in the UAE.
What form could these losses take ?
The financial costs of a poor or missing health and safety management system can be broken down into two categories; direct and indirect costs.
Direct Costs:
- The cost of damages to equipment and properties that have been involved in the occupational health and safety failure
- Legal fees such as prosecution fines or solicitor fees
- Higher insurance company costs following the health and safety accident/incident or occupational health and safety failure
Indirect Costs:
- The indirect costs created by accidents are generally not immediately seen. These include;
- Paying the wages of the employee during their absence
- Salaries of other employees that had to redirect their work to look after or help the injured worker. And are now covering the injured workers duties
- Lost of production, inability to additional fulfil contracts
- Overtime payments made to staff necessary to resume the operation of the business
- Time spent investigating the health and safety accident or incident and/or closure of that part of the business whilst the accident is investigated
- Monies spent employing expert safety consults, such as Corporate OHS
- Medical bills not covered by insurance but paid directly by the employer g. co-payment
- Decreased productivity from all staff which could be due to nervousness or cautiousness and lack of trust in the companies facilities or procedures
- Higher staff turnover rates as staff lose confidence in the company and look to work elsewhere in a safer environment
- Cost of hiring and training new staff
- Cost of using agency or temporary agency
- Possible inability to tender for future work, having to now declare the accident on all tender documents
- Damage to the companies reputation and public image
- Loss of client, customer or supplier loyalty due to negative publicity
Many companies make the mistake of assuming that their insurance will cover them for the full cost of any health and safety accident. This is simply not true and insurance will only cover the tip of the iceberg costs. Long established studies have shown that for every 5 AED an insurer will cover, 160 AED will need to be paid direct by the company for an occupational health and safety failure.
For example, reputational damage is impossible to insure but the loss of this will break a company. A serious health and safety accident will hugely adversely affect sales and profits. This damage is often irreparable.
You may be under the impression that your workplace is safe, or low risk. But this may well be better linked to a lack of understanding as regards to health and safety risk, not to the real situation.
Failing to properly manage your companies health and safety risk could lead to your company profits being wiped out – solely through unsafe work practices. The financial survival of any company may therefore be linked to a single serious health and safety accident or incident.
How to I mitigate this health and safety risk ?
Hopefully the above outlines how essential it is that a company develops and implements effective health and safety processes and procedures that seamlessly integrate occupational health and safety into all operations and activities.
Now for the good news ! It is easy to take positive steps to help to prevent health and safety accidents and incidents from occurring in the first place.
If you do not have in house trained and experienced resource then an outsourced Consultant HSE resource can not only help mitigate health and safety risk, they can also boost a companies productivity and profits via:
- Demonstrating effective management of occupational health and safety will improve staff morale and productivity as staff feel confident that value them and are keeping them safe. They’ll understand that they can work effectively free from the worry of danger
- In todays workplace, workplace stress and health and safety accidents or incidents are two of the biggest causes of absence. Whether these absences are short and unplanned, causing interruption and disruption, or long term sickness from values staff. They will have a serious impact on any companies productivity, sales and overall profits
Corporate OHS – Safety Consultants
If you are looking for Safety Consultants to manage your occupational health and safety in the UAE. Corporate OHS is a Health and Safety Consultancy services provider whose HSE Consultants offer expert resources and superior performance to give you greater results.
We specialize in creating workable, user friendly solutions aligned to your business activities, operations and budget.
Our range of health and safety consultancy services includes;
- Health and Safety Risk Assessments
- Hazard identification and control measure implementation
- Gap Analysis
- Audits and compliance audits
- HSE management system development, implementation and review including locally compliant systems such as OSHAD or OSHJ and/or accredited systems such as ISO 45001, ISO 14001,
ISO 9001 and ISO 50001 - HSE legal compliance reviews and assistance
- Health and Safety Accident investigations
- Business continuity and crisis management
- Long term or project based HSE outsourcing
- Flexible monthly support retainers giving access to HSE service without the burden of a permanent cost
To find out more about our services, please visit our website www.corporateohs.com or send an email to enquiries@corporateohs.com, or call 00 971 4 550 7862.