If you’re investing in something, or if you have invested in something, then chances are you plan on getting a return from your efforts. If you don’t expect to get something back when you put money, time, or energy into something, then you end up with a negative sum value, and depending on your situation, that either becomes unsustainable or turns into a money pit.
There are a few different ways to check on the success of your investments. You can do operator rounds, you can look for budget improvements, you can find out if risk assessment trends are showing positive movement, or you can even do workplace happiness surveys over time. All of these showcase different ways to determine value over the long run.
Operator Rounds
Especially in industrial settings, using operator rounds is an excellent way to check your return on investment on a small scale. Licensed people are going to do rounds and ensure that everything is working smoothly. When all of the parts and pieces of an industrial process are regularly monitored, it’s straightforward to tell when something is going awry. It’s a minimal amount of time and attention that goes into creating appropriate operator rounds, and the return is that it’s improbable for catastrophes to happen when people are on watch.
Budget Improvements
If you look at income and expenses of an overall project or company, you can see movement over time regarding profit and loss. If your return on investment ratio is improving, then you’ll see that the budget starts to work in a more financially positive way. In other words, with good return on investment processes, your company is going to make more money! From there, you can reassess your budget and resource management in order to continue this upward trend.
Risk Assessment Trends
And then there’s the idea of risk assessment. If you are investing time and money into the concept of safety, then as you continue to assess the risks in a project, they should go down. There should be a direct correlation between adding energy and resources into safety and getting fewer accidents or problems as outputs.
Workplace Happiness Surveys
Return on investment isn’t always just financial either. You may invest in some new office supplies for the company staff. If one week you send out an employee happiness survey, and it comes back with one set of numbers, and then after you implement some new workplace benefit, you give that survey again, and it comes back with positive results, then you know that you are getting a good return on your investment into that activity. Just make sure that you understand correlation and causation correctly in this instance.