Page 62 - Occupational Health & Safety, October 2018

Employee Gifts & Incentives
When it Comes to Safety, Size Shouldn’t Matter
Technology has made parity achievable. Small and large companies can take comfort in knowing that, when it comes to worker safety, company size need not matter.
BY BRIAN GALONEK
Distractions are the same for all workers, whether they are part of an organization with 50 employees or 50,000. And so it would only seem right to assume that the
business world has provided all entities, no mat- ter their size, with the solutions they need to keep workers safe on the job. The truth, however, is that larger companies have always enjoyed many ad- vantages over their smaller brethren. The kind of advantages that come naturally as a result of simply being bigger, such as:
■ Financial backing
■ Rapid scalability
■ Brand recognition
■ Political influence
■ Health care costs
■ Talent acquisition
In many ways, the fight isn’t even fair and as a
result, oftentimes the fight is short-lived and deci- sively won by the larger entity. Sure, occasionally some smaller player will come along and innovate in a way that allows it to compete and eventually become one of the larger players (think Amazon in 1998 vs. today), but those eye-catching exceptions are exactly that, exceptions. For every small com- pany that makes it big, there are hundreds (thou- sands, probably) that do not. There are numerous potential causes for the financial failure of smaller
companies, but one of the most prevalent in safety- sensitive companies is an inability to control their safety-related costs. Whether it be a single catastro- phe (one major preventable accident) or an over- abundance of smaller incidents’ “death by a thou- sand cuts,” the smaller the company, the bigger the cost of safety-related failures.
Technology Levels the Playing Field
While the safety deck has been stacked against smaller companies for decades, technology and other innovations have begun to level the playing field in a growing number of ways. In at least this one incredibly critical area, the advantages histori- cally enjoyed by large over small has all but been eliminated as technology is being used by compa- nies of all sizes to better promote their safety goals and objectives. This is somewhat unique in that technology has not been able to help in certain other safety-related areas, to be sure. Health insur- ance, as an example, still costs smaller companies far more per employee, and there has been no tech- nology innovation that has truly helped smaller companies insure their workers at a reasonable cost relative to larger companies. The same is true with other expense line items such as legal costs, regu- latory compliance, and the like. However, when it comes to compelling workers to be safer on (and off) the job, there are some ways in which the tide has truly turned and technology is leading the way.
The typical safety program has long been com- prised of some features that all companies could afford, such as training, mentoring, and providing personal protective equipment. The thing that most separated the haves from the have nots has been the budget and staff necessary to take those otherwise normal safety program features and imbed them into a safety culture and structure that is truly built for success. To create an attention-grabbing com- prehensive safety program that could break through the distractions and clutter of everyday life and suc- cessfully promote safety to any size workforce. To do that successfully, safety programs need to add energy and connectivity, they need to be dynamic and to work 24/7/365, and they need to find their way past the confines of the workplace and into the
58 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2018
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