Everybody knows investments in workplace safety and health prevent accidents and injuries. But a new study indicates that are other bottom-line benefits as well.
If you need some more ammunition to convince your top management and managers throughout your organization of the value of investing dollars and time in workplace safety and health, you’ll be interested in a study commissioned recently by the New Zealand Department of Labour.
Labor officials challenged a team of researchers from Massey and Auckland Universities to answer this simple, but intriguing question:
If businesses invest in health and safety, how does this contribute to their performance and productivity?
According the Department of Labour’s website (www.dol.govt.nz), researchers found "compelling evidence" of many potential benefits of the links between health and safety and performance and productivity, including:
- Fewer injuries that stop people from working, interfering with production
- Increased innovation
- Improved quality
- Enhanced corporate reputation
- Lower costs to compensate workers for work-related injuries and illness
- Improved staff recruitment and retention
- A high-quality working environment
- Good levels of cooperation between management and employees
- Work organization that gives employees challenges, responsibilities, and job autonomy
- The development of new working methods and equipment to improve working postures and decrease the strain of physical work
- Creative solutions for specific safety and health problems
- A thorough analysis of the different production costs that can be directly or indirectly related to health and safety hazards (costs of incidents, loss of productivity and quality, and other production costs due, for example, to the use of inadequate materials)
Are your workplace policies effective? Do you have policies to cover all key employment issues? If not, we do, and they’re already written and ready to use. Try BLR’s Essential Safety Policies right now and receive a FREE special report. Get details here.
Common Success Factors
The study also identified a number of common success factors in businesses that demonstrate the links between work quality and productivity including:
Get the safety policies you need without the work. They’re in BLR’s Essential Safety Policies program. Try it at no cost and no risk, and claim your FREE special report. Find out how.
Safety Starts with Policies
To improve safety in your workplace so that your organization can reap the many rewards identified in the New Zealand study, you need to start with effective safety policies. It is essential to have explicit rules and procedures for dealing with all workplace safety and health issues.
That’s why you should strongly consider investigating a resource that can do most of the work of crafting highly effective safety and health policies for you. It’s called Essential Safety Policies, and it provides you with an array of pre-written, comprehensive policies for every safety need.
What’s more, you get sample strict, standard, and progressive versions of each policy, so that you can determine which approach is best for your workplace and your employees.
You can use these policies "as is" or adapt them to your organization’s particular needs and style. Each section in the manual provides you with comprehensive lists of points to cover if you want to adapt one of the policies or draft your own.
You can incorporate these policies into your employee handbook, too, to make sure all employees are made aware of your workplace rules and requirements.
And Essential Safety Policies doesn’t stop there—it gives you a detailed list of other important things to consider when you implement these policies, such as interrelation with other policies, employee education, legal considerations, and more.
Take these kinds of materials and multiply them by more than two dozen key safety topics, and you’ll know why Essential Safety Policies is such a valuable tool for busy safety professionals. These policies provide a ready-to-modify or use-as-is safety handbook for all your workers, with minimal effort on your part.
The policies are backed by a tutorial on policy writing and essential materials such as handbook receipts. A CD version is also available.
If your organization could benefit from supplementing (or perhaps having for the first time) a complete set of ready to use safety policies, we highly recommend a 30-day, no-cost, no-obligation, look at this program. Go here and we’ll be pleased to send it to you.
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