What Are the Organizational Costs of a Fatality in the Workplace?

Feb 20 2023

What Are the Organizational Costs of a Fatality in the Workplace?

In the last 5 years, there have been 1128 workplace fatalities recorded in the United Kingdom. Each one of these will have caused enormous heartache and stress for the families involved.

For the organization behind the incident, a fatality in the workplace will have a number of detrimental consequences which can be very difficult to recover from.

When we consider an accident in the workplace, and in this case a fatality, the implications on an organization are huge, both operational and financial.

From an operational perspective, a fatality will have a knock-on effect on staff members surrounding the incident. Losing a colleague to a workplace accident will cause stress, upset, and unease.

Team members might require time away from the workplace to recover, they might feel unsafe in their own roles, or they might consider leaving the organisation altogether.

Following a fatality at work, workplace morale will be extremely low which will impact productivity and how the business operates.

Depending on the nature of the incident, the business and its operations might be temporarily closed by the HSE pending an investigation into the accident. In some cases, a business will not reopen.

From a financial perspective, a fatality in the workplace will cost a company an average of £106,000, with no upper limit on the fine imposed.

Not only that but under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, companies and organisations can be found guilty of corporate manslaughter as a result of serious management failings resulting in a gross breach of a duty of care.

Full details on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 can be found here.

How Can Stop’N’Go Help?

With fatal accidents from a moving vehicle, a moving object, or moving machinery accounting for nearly 50% of fatalities in the workplace, addressing the safety measures around these hazards is a natural place for an organisation to start.

At Stop’N’Go our main passion and focus are to reduce workplace accidents as much as possible by making communication as clear as possible for operatives.

From our extensive user trials and research prior to development, we found out that poor visibility was the number 1 reason that reversing accidents occurred and that 89% of all users reported better visibility of the hand signals being given to drivers when using the Stop’N’Go range of gloves.

Making communication clearer is a good place to start and is vital to improving the safety culture on site. Making it easy to differentiate between the proceed and STOP signals reduces the potential for mistakes, and more importantly, accidents.

That’s why at Stop’N’Go we believe that the most important but overlooked part of creating a safe operation in any industry is communication.

By improving the communication culture of your operatives on site, you are adding an additional level of safe practice to your operations, which in turn can assist with the reduction of accidents and safer working practices.

If you are interested in arranging a user trial for your organization, request a sample pack here or contact us to discuss how Stop’N’Go can work with you to improve the safety culture within your organization.