Safety, the Leak in Your Profitability Tank-Part II

In part one of this 2-part series, we talked about the effects of reducing early hire failure on the lost-time accident rates of different businesses. The effects of that simple process, using a prehire assessment to accomplish those reductions, were large and dramatic improvements in the profitability. 

This second part will talk about the synergistic effects of adding a direct assessment of attitudes about safety, for both job candidates and existing employees. First, a real-world story from one of our clients who has implemented such an assessment:

This large-scale bulk hauling company routinely hauls drilling and fracking wastes from petroleum industry sites all over the country. These loads are virtually all highly regulated hazmat fluids, extremely costly to contain and remove if spilled. The temporary roads they must travel are primitive and hazardous, in their own right.

They often bid new contracts in compressed timeframes, and then need to hire and employ drivers with the necessary credentials in markets where such drivers are rare, and be ready to operate new routes and processes in very short order. Not surprisingly, they sometimes need to “take what we can get,” in hiring.

Three years ago, in just such a scenario, they bid the contract, hired 20 drivers, began hauling…and, in the first 3 months of the contract, they had two rollover accidents, with combined cleanup costs in excess of $3 million dollars!

We had been working with them on other assessment projects, so it was natural for them to ask if we had safety assessments…and, naturally, we did! We performed a local validation assessment on the 20 new drivers, and found that, with only a couple of exceptions, none of them really cared about safety! For further confirmation, we assessed another team of drivers in another location, with an exemplary safety record, and found they were, by orders of magnitude, more concerned about safety.

The company instituted our safety assessment for all new drivers, and all current drivers; they focused hiring efforts on drivers with high concern for rules and safety, and used the results with existing employees to guide their safety education efforts.

In the succeeding 2 and one-half years, their rate of hazmat accidents have declined by over 60%, saving the company millions of dollars in insurance and cleanup costs.

Your business may not have the high level of risk described here, but every business faces some risk from poor safety attitudes, especially in the current virus risk environment. That risk, if not mitigated, is a steady, sometimes catastrophic leak in your profits…and the assessments that can successfully help in mitigation are very inexpensive!