The current perception in the hotel industry is that staff safety solutions are simply a compliance requirement or legal necessity. Moreover, workplace panic buttons and duress systems are perceived as mainly an expense, an added hassle that requires maintenance and extra labor for those involved, perhaps with greater cost than benefit or return on investment.
As a mission-based company, we’d like to help reframe this perception and showcase how implementing a solution provides more benefits than anticipated. We believe providing employee safety devices to hotel workers will result in cost-savings - reducing risk and long-term expenses.
We spent the last 6 months conducting market research from trusted sources as well as and sifting through industry studies to validate this assumption. After countless weeks of investing time and effort into quantifying these benefits, we built an ROI calculator that will allow any hotelier to articulate the value of the solution customized to their property. Yes, there are costs to rolling out panic buttons to staff. This tool will provide an understanding of the qualitative benefits (and cost savings).
Our ROI Calculator: A Walkthrough
Our ROI Calculator is an interactive estimation system that generates a customized summary based on harassment & injury risk, turnover, productivity, and liability figures for your property. The only mandatory input fields in this calculation process are the number of housekeepers, the number of rooms in your hotel, and the average wage of your housekeepers. If you input these three numbers, all other statistics such as rates of assault, turnover, and average liability costs can be drawn from research done by credited sources such as OSHA to calculate your custom return on investment. Importantly, if you wish, the calculator also invites you to input your calculated estimates of these factors that you think might be specific or unique to your hotel for whatever reasons.
In building this tool, there were five main factors that we took into consideration:
- Harassment Risk: Calculated using the rate of harassment (industry average or your informed estimate) and the number of housekeepers
- Turnover from Harassment: Calculated using the annual rate of turnover (industry average or your informed estimate) tallied with the average cost of turnover and the number of housekeepers in your property
- Productivity: Productivity improvement is an estimate by the entity's input into our calculator based on the impact they project that taking better care of their employees will have
- Injury Risk: Calculated using the number of housekeepers, rate of injury (industry average or your informed estimate), and the average cost of injury leading to added liability costs
- Liability due to Workman’s Comp Claims: Calculated using the percentage of claims (industry average or your informed estimate), average number of claims tried, and cost per claim to determine total liability
You can try out our ROI calculator for yourself at this link on our website, and receive a free estimate of the costs and return on investment that follows from investing in a staff safety solution such as AlwaysOn.
We previously wrote about the unanticipated benefits in this “8 Other Uses of Wearable Panic Buttons in Hotels”. It’s important to perspective take when considering the value of protection against sexual assault/injury/safety in the workplace as it has real and detrimental consequences. There are many diversity and inclusion reports that call us to shift our perspective from this type of thinking, such as this one written about the financial repercussions for staff who are affected by sexual harassment in the workplace. For example, did you know that the lifetime costs of workplace sexual harassment and retaliation can range from anything ranging from $125k to $1.3 million? These can have especially dire consequences for those working low-wage jobs such as housekeepers, where the loss of earnings can translate to higher financial charges, lowered credit scores, mounting debt for student and other loans, repossession of cars, evictions from housing and temporary homelessness, reduced retirement security and so on.
Take the ROI calculator here: roarforgood.com/roi
Let’s cultivate a safer workplace together. Find out more about how panic buttons can help to keep your staff safe, and the importance of promoting a safe working environment, by contacting a member of our team today.
