First — You Gotta Get Their Attention

How frustrating is it for all the Safety Managers and Safety Directors out there to spend all the time we do keeping abreast of developments, technology, regulations, landmark cases and events, and all the myriad details we track… just to be seen as a “Cost Centre”? The Safety Office of most companies find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. To employees, safety people are often seen as a “nuisance”, and by managment often seen as an “unavoidable expense”. Death… taxes… safety…

What’s the Reality?

Simple. Workplace accidents are “Expense”. They cost direct compensation, insurance premiums, lost time (often by multiple personnel), work stoppage, turnover, and training/retraining costs. There is a great analysis of workplace injury expenses available in an eTool from OSHA at Loss Estimator. Accidents are the “Problem”, Safety is the “Solution”.

If you are a typical Safety Administrator feeling like salmon swimming upstream against the rapids when it comes to getting programs implemented and budgeting, try tearing a page out of the Marketing and PR books. (If you have access to these departments in your company, it’s worth making a friend over there and discussing this.) Prepare and circulate a “Brag Sheet” on a regular basis, among the management of your firm. You have Programs and Projects in place, and you probably have Benchmarks in place for measuring effectiveness. You certainly have figures available from prior years’ performance.

Calculate your savings through effective performance, then USE THE eTOOL to convert those savings into EQUIVALENT SALES VOLUME!!!

You may have noticed that while the Safety Department is often looked upon as the ‘necessary evil’, a Sales Department is seen as the life blood of operations. Let someone close a $100,000 sale, and word gets around quickly.

But watch this. If your new Safety Program results in a $10,000 reduction in loss, and if your business runs on a 10% profit margin (which is not unusual), then your program has had the same bottom-line impact as if you had just closed a $100,000 sale. That is, $10,000 loss reduction is pure profit. The $100,000 sale, on a 10% profit margin, is $10,000 profit. There’s the equivalence.

See if you can make a habit of expressing your safety victories in terms of sales equivalents, and you may start to make a more positive image in the Board Room. This is not a matter of personal ambition or political jockeying for gain. You need this leverage to free the funding and approval for more proactive programming or safety improvements.

Sometimes, it’s all in the words you use. The most effective one for your needs, may be “Profit”.