4 Financial Reasons for Greater Lone Worker Safety

Many companies these days are cutting down on operational costs to protect their bottomline. Often, this can result in manpower shortage so you may end up with some workers working alone instead of having a “buddy system” in place. But if you really want to make avoid throwing away money, you seriously need to consider obtaining proper lone worker safety. Failure to do so can result in a very expensive mess.

Consider the many ways your company loses money when your workers suffer from verbal abuse and perhaps even physical assaults without proper security and assistance measures in place:

1. Lower worker productivity. If a worker gets hurt while doing their job, it helps if you get them help as quickly as possible. That can minimize the severity of the injuries and symptoms, and you can get your work back more quickly. If not, then they may spend more time recuperating.

Having no special security for lone workers can also be very demoralizing. Some people may not work as well as they should for your company, if they feel that you’re not doing your best to ensure their safety. It also doesn’t help morale when your workers are always under the threat of physical assault or verbal abuse.

2. Tarnished brand image. If a worker in your company gets attacked and doesn’t get help immediately, it doesn’t bode well for the image and reputation of your company. News reports may not paint a pretty picture of your failure to provide proper security measures.

Even constant verbal abuse can be an issue. While that may not result in news headlines, your workers can still spread their discontent through social media. They can post videos of various dangers they may encounter while working alone. Several videos of teachers being attacked by students have already gone viral.

When such videos of your workers being attacked or verbally abused are posted, it doesn’t really put your brand in a great light. Your customers can wonder that if you don’t care about your workers, you may also not care about the quality of the goods and services you offer.

3. Increasing insurance costs. When your worker is attacked or gets hurt, your insurance generally pays for the medical bills. However, when you file claims of this sort too frequently because you don’t have adequate security in place, you may end up paying much hunger premiums just to maintain your medical liability insurance. That doesn’t exactly help with your bottom line. In addition, dealing with insurance companies can also take up too much of your time when you should be doing other important things for your company.
4. You may end up with legal fees when your worker sues you. The cost can then run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and again the case also generates lots of negative publicity. One estimate has it that such cases can result in an average of a $250,000 loss for a company. That’s a lot of money—are you really sure your company can weather that kind of a loss?

What you need to understand is that lone worker safety is a serious issue, and you have the ethical and legal obligation to make sure that you do everything you can to boost the safety of your employees. They need to be able to ask for assistance when they need help. If they’re incapacitated, you need measures in place that monitors the status of your lone workers so that assistance can be sent when it’s needed.

You need to spend a little bit of money on lone worker safety. It’s much better than losing a lot more money after an incident—and with your brand’s image tarnished along the way!