Across the world, companies saw the unmitigated spread of coronavirus within their facilities force shutdowns with huge financial impacts. Volkswagen shut down production and the company lost $2.2 billion a week. Smithfield Foods was forced to shut down its South Dakota factory and it caused meat shortages across the country. Overall, it’s estimated that unplanned downtime in manufacturing costs companies an average of $250 thousand per year – according to a study by ServiceMax.
Operational shutdowns and delays are astronomically expensive, no matter what the reason. Yet, until recently (the start of the pandemic), many companies did not adequately address a major threat to operational efficiency – the spread of contagious illness among employees.
Company policies instead focused primarily on things like workplace injury prevention and ensuring governmental and union safety regulations were followed. While these factors and other traditional Employee Health and Safety (EHS) procedures remain important, the rapid spread of Covid-19 displayed the immense damage infection spread can have not only on employees, but also companies’ bottom lines. Company after company were forced to either run short-staffed or shut down completely and it had a massive impact on the global economy and supply chain.
Covid-19 took the world by surprise, and its impact never could have been predicted, but its impact on supply chains could have been minimized. This was made clear by companies that instantly took proper infection control steps to limit the spread of contagious illness within their facilities. Many companies that took these steps never had to shut down or slow operations – such as MacLean-Fogg.
In our latest eBook, we take a deeper dive into the devastating cost of shutdowns and the “old way” of approaching contagious illness prevention, we take a look at the shift in employee expectations, we review success stories of navigating infection control, and finally we introduce steps that can be taken to mitigate the spread of illness in the workplace.
