Is Your Safety Program Stealing From You?
Perhaps I’m a little nostalgic.
With the announcement of Sir Sean Connery’s passing last week, I’ve found my thoughts wandering to him, and some of the roles he’s played. Whether a suave spy as “007” or a bumbling father in “Indiana Jones”. By far though, it was one of his smaller roles that I recall. His role as “Robert McDougal” in the film “Entrapment“ I found to be one of my favorites. A highly organized, professional art thief, much of his time was spent mentoring a young Catherine Zeta-Jones in the art of thievery, through increasingly complex and intricate security measures.
You may ask yourself, what does “Safety” have to do with theft. Great question. Safety, when executed properly is a subset of an overarching concept known as “Loss Control”, whose ultimate goal is to reduce costs, and overhead spending.
When executed improperly, Safety can become a highly organized professional emptying your company coffers, through increasingly complex, and intricate measures. (See what I did there?) Let’s explore 3 major losses, related to employees and processes, and how we can eliminate, or substantially reduce them.
Ever get the feeling that what you were hired for, is only 20% of your job? Your people feel it too. It’s more common than you think. Simple processes seem to bloat up, carrying “nice to haves” while essentials are left to the back burner, or moved to the “To-Do List”. Oh, we know it shouldn’t happen, but reports, administration, and email all tend to clog up our thinking space — and bog down our once smoothly running machine. These losses lurk around your business, stealing from you. Maybe you’re even aware of them — but see them as a necessary evil. Cumulatively they cost much more than you expect. Let’s take a minute to expose them.
1. Administration: If you don’t already, you should start thinking of this as a dirty word. Administration is a fancy way of saying double, triple, or quadruple handling of material. Reviewing & forwarding certifications, tracking down signatures, filing…
Much of it isn’t even essential to our business and could get by with a cursory review. Stop paying your Team to shuffle paper. Get them doing what you hired them for.
The Answer — Automate. Bastion software can save you thousands managing your workflows, signatures, and filing. For safety, onboarding, people, equipment and more.
2. Onboarding: Experts have calculated that the onboarding, training, and mentorship of an employee can cost between 20 & 30% of their annual wage. Think about that for a second.
That means to replace a $50K / year worker, the cost can be almost fifteen thousand. Consider it like an iceberg — The tip that sticks out of the water is the initial training, paperwork, and mandatory stuff. But mentorship and the development of employee competency drives that cost upward.
The Answer: An SMS. Bastions “Safety Management System” can onboard, manage the training and competency your team (or just about anything else). Couple that with the ability to drip-feed ongoing training. It can be in-house, or through our massive online training library.
3. Un-Necessary Travel: We bring employees to head office to train or we send trainers out to job sites. All the while hoping we deliver a consistent message. The only consistency is this — Travel is expensive…and its likely your industry considered it unavoidable, until COVID necessitated it.
The Answer: Meet /Train Workers Online — For the price of 1 round trip ticket, we can train 10 people online, and the message will be consistent every time. We’ll even verify their identity, and test them to make sure of it.
CUSTOMIZE EVERY FACET OF YOUR SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
