Is Average Good Enough?

It’s often tough to admit that you’re average, especially when comparative measures show your competition is better than you.  This is especially true for company leaders when they compare themselves to their competitors on customer satisfaction, productivity levels and profit margins.  The C-suite is frequently looking at these scores and trying to improve them in order to improve the bottom line.  Is this the case when companies compare themselves on employee engagement and safety scores?

Employee engagement has been a buzz topic especially in the past 10 years or so.  More and more companies are interested in measuring their employee engagement levels as studies have shown that engaged employees are more productive.  It has also shown that higher engagement scores leads to higher customer satisfaction scores.  Because of this, companies are budgeting time and money to work on increasing their engagement scores.  They want to be better than average so they have a competitive advantage.

Now compare that to safety which has been measured for decades including incidence and severity rates.  By law companies have to measure and keep safety statistics.  Safe and healthy employees are also more productive.  However, I don’t see or hear of companies trying to outperform one another when it comes to safety.  (At least not in my world.  If it’s happening in yours, please comment!)  Companies pay attention to their safety stats in order to keep their workers’ compensation insurance premium down but rarely do they focus on safety for the productivity gains.  Why is that?

If you’ve been reading my blogs, you will see a common theme and that is safety and productivity go hand in hand, although very few people outside of safety circles see that way or truly believe it. Safety and ergonomics can have a significant impact on employee engagement.  So as EH&S professionals, let’s start using employee engagement as a tactic to get C-level buy-in for our programs.  Let’s make a point of stating that being “average” in safety isn’t good enough.  We need to convince and prove to upper management that moving beyond being satisfied with dealing with injuries after they happen hurts employee engagement.  We need to transform the current practice to a proactive, risk-avoidance and process improvement system where employees are engaged in every step.  This will not only lead to improved safety scores, but also improved employee engagement, productivity and customer satisfaction—the BOTTOM LINE.  Don’t be satisfied with average—It’s NOT good enough!