Selling top management on safety programs is made easier and more likely to succeed when you use four powerful tactics.
The benefits of workplace safety performance are often undervalued because of communication barriers between safety professionals and executive management, and the challenge of instituting metrics that demonstrate safety performance in financial or strategic business value terms.
To turn that situation around, consider these four basic strategies to enhance the business value of safety.
1. Identify safety as a core business value driver. Profitability is an obvious corporate value driver, but so are brand name, compliance risk, and productivity of workers. All of these drivers are influenced to some degree by workplace safety activities.
Some years back, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company surveyed senior financial executives at large and mid-sized companies about their views on safety and insurance. These executives cited increased productivity and reduced costs as the top benefits of workplace safety and health.
In an earlier survey, an overwhelming majority of executives believed that workplace safety had a positive impact on a company’s financial performance. Many cited a return of investment of $3 for every $1 they invested in workplace safety programs.
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2. View safety as an investment in continuous improvement. An “investment” is a commitment to earn a financial return or gain future benefits or advantage. Safety programs have been directly linked to the benefits of increased productivity and efficiency. For example, a container manufacturer reported a 20% increase in the number of boxes produced per day on an assembly line after an ergonomics consultant recommended operational changes to eliminate repetitive arm and shoulder injuries.
3. Use a combination of leading and trailing indicators of safety performance. Using the combination instead of just trailing (or lagging) indicators to measure progress toward business objectives is much more effective.
Leading indicators tell you about the future value or direction of performance.
- Employee turnover rate can indicate future changes in productivity and/or injury rates.
- The number and frequency of near-misses can indicate the risk of future accidents.
- Hours of employee safety training completed or the number of employees trained can indicated changes in productivity and safety.
- The number and/or frequency of completed inspections can indicate the level of compliance risk, integrity of equipment, and changes in productivity.
Trailing indicators tell you where you’ve been. For example:
- Injury and illness reports
- Lost workdays
- Workers’ compensation claims
Trailing indicators can highlight past costs, but they are inconsistent and often unreliable indicators of future performance.
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4. Enhance employee involvement. It’s not effective just to tell employees what to do and judge them on how well they follow directions. Since they are working with the process all the time, workers are more sensitive to the integrity of safety and productivity data than management. For example, workers can see what is really going on behind the data in the injury and illness reports where management often cannot. Employee involvement is now a major component of most true safety performance evaluation methods.
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