Part 2 of the Building Employee Engagement series discussed how employee recognition can positively impact engagement in the workplace. I wrote that actively disengaged workers are costing the U.S. economy up to $605 billion annually. In this post, I want to focus on how employee engagement can affect safety initiatives. How does investing in employee engagement as it pertains to safety save your organization?

According to the National Safety Council, a U.S. worker is injured on the job every 7 seconds. In one year’s time, a staggering 4,700,000 U.S. workers are injured while at work. Additionally, SHRM’s Employee Engagement: Your Competitive Advantage briefing tells us that at Molson Coors, highly engaged employees are five times less likely to have a safety incident at work. Highly engaged employees are not only seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident, but, also, average seven times less in average safety cost at $63 than disengaged employees who average $392. Molson Coors reported savings of $1,721,760 in year one of applying engagement principles. It should come as no surprise that employees that are engaged in their work pay closer attention to detail and produce a much safer work environment.

When it comes to employee engagement, employee safety programs are the most important and impactful when well-designed and properly executed. Keeping employees safe at work should be an essential part of any organization’s mission. At QIC, our employee safety programs serve to enhance safety culture by helping to ingrain safe thinking and safe practices in everyone’s work habits. Over time, these become established and part of the organization’s DNA.

Contact us to discover more about the benefits of improved employee engagement and its impact on employee safety.  We’ve also composed an employee safety Best Practices Guide, which we hope you will find beneficial.  I think we can safely say there’s some good info there!