It’s Your Business

Workplace Safety and the Customer Experience

It has been a long haul since March 2020. The cycle of opening, closing, reopening, and closing again for businesses in Oregon has been like a never-ending roller coaster ride. The focus has shifted from thriving to surviving and reconnecting with customers.

Customers have changed, too. To rebuild customer relationships and gain consumer confidence, businesses are forced to rethink their customer experience. Employees, managers, and owners play a vital role in this process.

Customers want to feel safe when they resume travel and make dining out part of their routine. Providing a safe and healthy workplace where employees feel productive and cared for is the foundation for boosting consumer confidence. A positive customer experience depends on:

• Adequate staffing • Knowledgeable, professional, welltrained employees • Feeling heard and understood • A clean, safe, secure environment • A product or service that meets or exceeds their expectations • Quick, timely, and considerate problem solving • No excuses

Here’s where workplace safety comes into the picture. Your business relies on people to operate. If an employee is injured on the job, it could impact each of the customer experience elements listed above. Customers build relationships with a company’s brand and their employees. The two are tightly woven, and customers quickly recognize high turnover in staffing. If employee safety is an afterthought, you lose valuable time reorganizing shift schedules, managing injury paperwork, conducting accident analysis, training, and reinforcing safety policies and procedures. Employees and management could invest this time to make sure customers are happy and well served.

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Employees are also dealing with a lot of stress during this time. Competing family priorities, inconsistent income, and job insecurity have taken a toll on today’s workforce. Beyond the general concerns around COVID-19, mental well-being in the workplace is just as important as injury and illness prevention. One way to erase the stigma around mental health in the workplace is to talk about it.

“If employers take steps to foster an environment where mental health issues and resources are discussed openly and regularly, workers will feel more comfortable accessing help. The results will also be good for your business because of lower health care costs, improved productivity, less absenteeism, and less turnover,” said Liz Hill, adviser, SAIF Total Worker Health.

Only one in three people who need mental health help get it, according to the American Psychiatric Association and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Similarly, free employee assistance programs offered by employers have only a 3-5 percent rate of use nationally. Reasons vary but include stigmatization, fear of losing their job, or simply lack of access to resources. Whatever the reason, mental health experts say the consequences are worse when people stay silent.

There are a lot of ways to support a culture of well-being, but an easy place to start is bringing up mental health. Supervisors can support employees by sharing resources available through benefit programs and the community.

“Maybe it's at your next team meeting, or on a walk with a co-worker, but the important thing is to make sure people feel like they can talk about it,” Hill says.

For more ideas on creating a healthy workplace for mental well-being, visit saif.com/wellbeing.  SAIF CORPORATION

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