Are You Having Trouble Justifying Ice Cleat Costs To Management?

When purchasing ice cleats or other winter traction aids for your employees to prevent slip and falls on ice and snow are you ever concerned the traction aids you are buying are too expensive?

While employees expect companies to spend whatever it takes to keep everyone as safe as possible, that’s not always be the case. As a matter of fact, from a pure numbers standpoint, it might even make sense to let the accidents happen.

Here is how to justify your costs and ROI (return on investment).

WARNING: There will be math in today’s lesson.

For example, let’s look at Company ABC over the course of a typical year:

Workforce size is 100 people.

Annual number of slips and fall incidents is 10.

Average direct cost per incident is $8,000. Indirect costs are substantially higher and not assumed in this example.

Annual aggregate cost is $80,000 for paying these 10 incidents.

Average cost per employee is $800 per employee (based on 100 employees).

Let’s say I could wave a magic wand over each employee’s head and guarantee they would not slip and fall for the next one year, but my magic wand service fee is $1,000 per employee.

With an average accident cost at $800 per employee, the cost to eliminate the accidents would exceed the total cost of the incidents themselves and financially speaking would not be worth preventing.

Don’t get me wrong… I am not advocating for accident acceptance! I’m simply pointing out in this example from a financial return-on-investment standpoint, there is not a lot of ground to stand on when trying to justify your purchase to the C-Suite.

But it is also possible to use this same example to quantify and justify your safety program, and obtain the funding that you might be having trouble securing.

Using the above scenario as above, if I knew I can reduce my incidents by 50%, it stands to reason that your break-even point would be half of the $800, or in this case $400 per employee.

So if you spend anything less than $400 per employee and see at least a 50% reduction in winter slip and falls, financially speaking, the program makes economic sense and is money well spent.

Speaking from historical experience, with the right ice cleats and winter traction aids in place Winter Walking frequently exceeds a 50% reduction of winter slip and falls the very first year, in fact more in most cases.

Winter Walking is the largest manufacture of ice cleats and traction aids in North American offering dozens of choices designed to prevent slips and falls and none of them are even close to $400.

If you are in charge of reducing accidents this example should help you justify the costs and show your decision makers your purchase is more than worth it.

Bottom Line: You can indeed spend too much on incident prevention. But if you do your homework, a little math it can be easy to justify expenditures that might appear at first glance to be too much.

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Bill Coyne is the VP of Sales for Winter Walking. He has been helping organizations across a wide variety of business sectors prevent workplace slips and falls incidents ice and snow for over 14 years. Winter Walking currently helps some of the world’s largest organizations keep their employees both safer and more productive while working outdoors in the winter season. Contact bill@winterwalking.com or visit www.winterwalking.com.