Do Safety Programs Hinder Productivity?

You can drive profitability by investing in keeping your workers accident free.  Safety programs can actually drive productivity, not the opposite as many have said for years.

We remember listening to safety professionals complain about how executives were more focused on productivity and profits. No matter the information that would not seem to support that tenant, the relationship between safety and productivity remains contentious in many companies.

There are still too many companies and too many working cultures that view safety training, and other safety practices designed to keep workers healthy and safe as productivity bottlenecks.  Remember the adage…”no one gets paid for not having accidents, they get paid for producing goods.”

Safety professionals know that injured workers don't produce anything. More importantly they know that workers afraid of having an accident produce less. From the safety profession view, safety doesn't stand in the way of productivity it is productivity.

A couple years ago there was data presented at the Safety Leadership Conference by Steve Ludwig of Rockwell Automat and data encompassed information from Rockwell’s Safety Maturity Index that measured manufacturing performance in three fields, safety culture, compliance and technology’s.

This data provided the following definitive relationship between safety and productivity:

Best-in-class companies—those ranking in the top 20 percent of aggregate performance scores on the index — recorded impressive efficiency rates – 90 percent OEE and just 2 percent unscheduled downtime.

While achieving best-in-class efficiency, these top companies also achieved an injury frequency rate of just 0.05 percent – about 18 times lower than the average companies and 60 times lower than laggards.

This relationship continues down the line: Better productivity, better safety; better safety, better productivity.

 "It's true that no one gets paid for not having accidents," Ludwig said. "But if we can reduce injury rate by half, then we can also increase both overall equipment effectiveness and unscheduled downtime."

In other words, you can use safety as a productivity driver.  You can drive increase profitability by investing in keeping your workers safe. 

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