How Safety Impacts Retention
Safety training can make a much bigger impact to your workforce (and your business revenue) beyond just government mandates...
For any industry, safety training is a must when it comes to having workforce. Whether you're a coffee shop or manufacturing cars - you have some level of safety training to complete in order to maintain compliance.
Focusing on industries like manufacturing, distribution, or the medical field, there are significantly more risks and dangers to the worker. For example, working in a warehouse picking could be considered low skill level, but the risk level of that individual is significantly high. With long hours picking items up, moving around multi-ton forklifts and surrounded by loud equipment, a lot can go wrong at any moment.
This is why ensuring the knowledge of safe work practices needs to be engrained into workers. With a simple mistake or forgotten procedure, a worker could be seriously injured... or killed.
Having quality safety training not only helps your workers stay safe, or meet government mandates, it also can save your business massive amounts of accident costs and even improving employee retention.
Breaking Down The Cost of Safety
Let's look at the numbers first. Having impactful and meaningful training that your workforce retains can not just help themselves, but also your business's annual costs. Even for low skill level positions, improving the retention of safety training can make a difference!
In 2020 Employers spent $722 Billion in comprehensive costs of preventable injuries (ref)
The direct costs to employers for a workplace injury claim on avg is $40,000 (ref)
The indirect costs are ~2x the direct costs of the claim (ref)
There are 2.3 cases per 100 FT employees for businesses in the US (ref)
Any accident is no joke in business, but just a few accidents a year can make a major dent in your business operating costs. If you could reduce your accidents by one in a year - you could be saving at least $120,000 dollars between the accidents costs and indirection operation costs lost.
By introducing training programs that really "stick" with employees can make the difference between workers returning home safely, and your business loosing money.
Workforce / retention impact of safety
"When you're here, you're family" might work for someone looking for a quick Italian meal, but for the modern employee it doesn't quite work the same. With labor cuts happening in just about every industry in the US - many employees don't feel like their job might as secure as it used to be. This is where making a legitimate connection with your employees makes a difference.
Through meaningful, engaging safety training, you're not just showing your employees to work safe, you're also showing them you care about their wellbeing. When an employee knows their company is ensuring they want them to get home safe at the end of the day - they feel a greater connection and willingness to stick with the company. In a recent study, 71% of 15,066 employees said job training and development increased their job satisfaction. And 61% said that upskilling is an important reason to stay at their jobs. (ref)
What does quality safety training mean for your business then? Not only lower accidents and happier employees - but also employees stay longer! Given the average cost of retention is 20%+ of the position's annual salary, losing just a few employees a year leaves a dent in your bank accounts!
How VR Can Help
Employees want to have a connection with the company and not just sit through another boring safety PowerPoint. Companies want employees that proactively work safe and want to stay longer.
Both of these needs can be met through using Virtual Reality (VR) training applications. By recreating the environment that employees work in, they can practice without the risk of injury and learn before they go and do said tasks. Since the applications can be gamified, employees can stay engaged longer and retain those critical safety skills they need.
VR also can save operational time for HR and trainers. Instead of having to host a seminar and hope everyone is paying attention, VR can be done autonomously with 100% consistency and accuracy for every training session. Now you can have your best trainer - just a digital double of them - in VR given the same exact lesson on demand. Plus the training can be broken into smaller, easier to handle sessions to allow for greater time accessibility of employees.
Reducing an accident in your business is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making massive operational improvements. Learn more about how the Enhance-VR team and our new training and recruiting platform can enhance your business at www.enhancevr.com!