While workplace safety has certainly improved since the introduction of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, or OSHA, in 1970, there is always room for improvement. Data has always been vital to the improvement of workplace safety and in the modern era where data is being generated at an unprecedented level, this information is more important than ever. Workplace safety data specifically can show us what is working, why it is working, and what needs to change in order to make the workplace an even safer environment.
Accidents Happen
Injuries within the workplace are, unfortunately, bound to happen sooner or later. While injuries in an office environment are not uncommon due to falls, poor ergonomics when performing repetitive motions, or bumping into stationary objects, data shows that those working in the natural resources, construction, and maintenance fields are far more likely to sustain nearly every type of injury in comparison. Injury data is important because it highlights how people are becoming injured, the severity of the injuries, and ultimately begins to show a path towards prevention.
This type of data can help a business become more informed on how extensive their workers’ compensation insurance policies should be. For instance, construction work is not only one of the more injurious jobs on the workforce, but can also be one of the most deadly due to falls from great heights, being struck by falling or fast-moving objects, electrocutions, or being caught between two objects and subsequently injured. Understanding how often and why these injuries occur can help to work towards reducing the rate that they occur.
Even as the workforce begins to incorporate more and more robotic assistance and automation tools, injuries will likely never become a thing of the past. While robots may one day take over the bulk of the more dangerous tasks in any field, gravity will always exist, which means things will drop and people will fall. Knowing the likelihood of any given injury in any given field is common sense and will help to make the workplace even safer going forward.
Prevention
Occupational health and safety specialists work tirelessly to reduce and ultimately prevent workplace injuries from occurring in the first place, and they rely on data to do so efficiently and effectively. One of the main facets of an occupational health and safety specialist’s job is to identify and record hazards documented in a workplace, then use that data to create and implement procedures and protocols to help teach employees how to prevent and react to workplace injuries. Data collection is incredibly important when it comes to developing best practices in regards to workplace safety.
The regulatory body behind workplace safety standards, OSHA, requires that meticulous records be kept of all work-related illnesses and injuries. This stringent record-keeping system generates a huge amount of data that is then analyzed to create employee training programs designed to reduce injury and illness in the workplace. The data not only identifies common injuries and what causes them, but also highlights accident-prone groups or individuals, allowing a business to relocate them to a safer position in order to prevent injury from occurring.
It isn’t just this work-related injury and illness-specific data that is helping to make workplaces safer, however. Industries like the airline industry use data to predict when planes will need maintenance, reducing the likelihood of the need for unexpected repairs on the runway or malfunctions in the sky. The simple fact of the matter is that data can be applied in a huge variety of ways in order to prevent injury from occurring in the first place.
The Cost Of Workplace Injuries
One of the main draws for businesses to utilize the data at their disposal in order to increase workplace safety is to reduce the cost of injuries or illnesses to their employees overall. Up front, workers’ compensation insurance will already account for a large investment of capital varying by location, type of work, size of business, and claims history. The investment into workers’ compensation insurance policies are well worth it as they help to cover medical expenses, ongoing care costs, disability benefits, and even lost wages.
Data comes into play here as well, as insurance companies are utilizing their huge data pools and analyzing them in order to streamline their operations. Data analysis allows insurance companies to quickly process claims that are determined to be of a low risk of fraudulence, better estimate their loss reserve, detect what claims are likely to be fraudulent, and overall speed along the claims process.
Utilizing data to avoid workplace injuries or illnesses in the first place is preferable, because even though workers’ compensation insurance will often cover much of the cost associated with a lapse in workplace safety, there are hidden costs as well. Other costs can include overtime costs paid out to other employees covering the injured employee’s workload, hiring and training a replacement worker, and a general loss of productivity due to rescheduling and accommodation for the injured worker.
At the end of the day, data relating to workplace safety does so much more than simply track who is suffering from what type of injury. When used properly, this data can help to reduce instances of workplace injury, saving a business a huge amount of money and time in the long run.
