How to Make Safety Priority #1 With Executives

In the world of incentives, we often hear that safety professionals have to fight for budget dollars against other processes for production, sales and marketing, etc.  In other words on any given day at any given work-site safety is always Priority One…until it isn’t! If it was truly the utmost priority, safety managers wouldn’t have to fight for every new initiative beyond basic requirements.  If you want to take safety programs from just another line item and turn it into a stand alone strategy, there are three basic things you need to do: 

1.  Make a financial business case for safety to your executive group.  A study published by Accident Analysis and Prevention found that CFOs and other executives believe that for $1 spent improving workplace safety, more than $4 would be returned.  For too long safety professionals sold safety programs as a way to keep a company from losing money.  They do, but they also help to improve a company’s productivity, employee engagement and their ability to make money.
2. Provide motivation for safety among the workforce.  The buzzword for several years now within the human resource precincts has been employee engagement.  Almost everything is tied to it, and now there is more and more evidence that a direct outcome to a more engaged workforce is better company performance.  Behavior based safety applications offers both plant and quality managers an additional level of performance as well.  Well planned safety recognition will reward improved performances, turn them into habits and help to engage your workforce.  Budgets for non-safety employee recognition has been growing consistently for years because it works to improve engagement…it can be that simple!
3. Integrate it into the culture of your company.  Training shows employees how to avoid risk and actions that lead to accidents.  Those skills and habits can be incorporated into other environments to produce fewer performance errors as well.

Will doing the above really improve overall company performance?  In a study published this year titled “Tracking the Market Performance of Companies that Integrate a Culture of Health & Safety: An assessment of Corporate Health Achievement Award Applicants”, researchers showed that the stock market performance of 31 companies that were acknowledged to have exceedingly high safety standards throughout their organization exceeded the S&P average in all 17 measures under examination.  The integration of the above three points makes it clear that safety and and other corporate strategies are inextricably linked.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net