Most people have felt like they are rushed on the job at one time or another. Maybe they had to hit a deadline. Maybe their boss just wanted them to be more productive. They felt like they had to rush and do their job as fast as they could.
As common as this is in the American workplace, it’s also very dangerous. The issue is that rushing increases the incidents of mistakes that are made on the job. Workers simply commit more errors when they feel pressured to work too quickly, and this is often less productive than if they just slowed down. In other words, telling employees to rush generally has the opposite impact that the boss believes that it will have.
How injuries may happen
In some cases, this just means that it takes longer to get jobs done or that workers end up wasting time. This is a problem from a productivity standpoint, but not much else.
However, workers who have to do physical jobs or are exposed to some level of risk may be more likely to be injured if they are rushing. After all, an error made by someone working on a computer probably just costs time as the error has to be rectified. But an error made by someone working on a roof could mean that they slip and fall off of the roof, that they drop a tool that strikes a worker below them or something else of this nature.
That said, it’s unlikely that we’re ever going to remove this propensity for rushing from the modern workplace. Productivity is king and high sales numbers mean everything. As long as workers are rushing, injuries are going to be more common, and the employees who have been hurt on the job need to make sure they know about all of the legal options at their disposal.