Building in Quality
1 Spending $1 to avoid a $100 problem makes sense, doesn't it? The earlier a problem is avoided or prevented, the less costly it is. Building quality into injury prevention is just like building quality into other products or services. If a problem is not avoided or fixed at the earliest stage in the supply chain, the cost of rectifying the problem increases exponentially, in terms of both money and time.

In workers compensation the cost of failure is injury to an employee. This can include benefit costs, lost productivity, service interruptions, and management distraction. In fact, in the U.S. companies lose up to 8% of their annual workforce capacity due to employee disability. And sometimes, the failure is so great that a worker has permanent health effects and may never re-enter the work force.

Unfortunately, too many companies spend most of their money fixing the failure of work injury after the fact. Investing in prevention is a 'nice to have', while spending on workers compensation is a 'cost of doing business'.

Great companies base their workers compensation interventions on the 1-10-100 principle, a staple of quality analysis: it costs $1 to prevent a failure, $10 to find it in the factory, and $100 to correct it in the field, with the customer. WorkWell brings the lessons of today's great companies to those striving to be great tomorrow.