Safety: The Business With-in Your Business

By: Tyler Shannon

Any business person understands that there are multiple ways to generate profit from their product. But a piece that often gets overlooked is the value behind Safety. Safety can drastically influence profit margin if not awarded an appropriate level of attention and resources. Driving investment away from safety is a short-term gain for a long-term failure. Investing in safety as a piece of your business will earn your company long-term financial profits and a world-class industry reputation that helps define your image as a leader in the industry.

Make no mistake, employee safety does come at a cost. It’s a cost that if not appreciated at all levels can be viewed as just a hole in a ship. Financials aside, unappreciated safety can lead to mistrust, undervalued employees, but worst of all an injury that affects someone and their family forever. If you are reading this , it’s because you can probably imagine your fears of horrific employee injuries being realized. You may even be able to point to one thing that you suspect your employees do where the next major injury is likely to occur. As a leader you must make a point to seek out the support of safety staff and take action on their advice to improve. Don’t view them as the hall monitors of a rebellious high school, view them as partners and allies toward improvement.

“Leading by example” is so clique, but really is vital when it comes to safety. If you create the expectation of a safety discussion before any work is performed, it will be the norm. If you, yourself, stop to think about the safety hazards of what you do, so will the employees around you. If you make safety an unimportant laughing matter that we have to do to say we did, than be prepared for an injury that you won’t be laughing about.

The costs of safety can be justified with a reasonable reflection considering the what-if. What-if something did happen and we didn’t have all of this support and focus in place to prevent it... how much would that cost us? That’s business. In the end, the commitment to never sacrifice safety is on a leadership that understands its true value. You drive down cost and prevent unexpected cost by reducing injuries. You maximize your reputation with employee safety engagement. That’s hidden profit. It’s profit because if you don’t do them, it is likely to come at the expense of great cost to your company. Other companies have learned this the hard way. You don’t have to.

Is the business of safety simple? No. No business is. Decisions have to be made, budgets have to be kept. Employees have to understand that a decision to solve safety hazards via administrative means, as opposed to engineering, comes with a responsibility and accountability. Every financial commitment that you make to their safety come at the expense of something else. There is no endless source of safety resources for any company, and there’s always more than one way to keep someone safe. Safety improvement one year, won’t necessarily assure improvement the next year. The minute it feels like the safety culture has never been stronger, is usually the time you must dig even deeper to the heart of

the business to find the latent weaknesses that you want to pretend don’t exist. It’s like having a successful product only to make sure the next version is twice as good as the first.

Depending on the needs of the company, safety can come at a significant price. Personnel responsible for driving and maintaining safety across the organization, tools to prevent injury, personal protection equipment, workman’s comp premiums, and outfitting equipment with safety devices (some of which may have been built before new safety regulations and expectations applied) are not cheap for any business. But think of it this way, the air time alone for a 30 second Super Bowl commercial cost upwards of $5 Million last year. For some organizations safety is a drop in the bucket compared to other spending. A recent organization I was a part of spent over a million dollars annually in each facility on safety. They did so because it was easy to look at the cost of workman’s compensation for a workforce where safety was not a priority and realize the potential cost to their brand and products by not committing to the price of employee safety. Even at this cost, they were no-where near invincible to safety incidents, but their commitment helped send their employees home to their families every day for the last 4 decades. Just one major injury can soar workman’s compensation costs into 6 figures, and that assumes no legal ramification or costly OSHA violations on top of it. A broken ankle from a slip on ice could be tens of thousands of dollars out of the corporate piggy bank and leave an employee debilitated for years. Now imagine if that same company didn’t actively work hard to improve safety… Other companies I have seen have one Safety Specialist over a team of thousands of employees. What kind of a message does it send to have one person preaching safety, developing programs, interpreting policy (and regulations), investigating incidents, auditing facilities, coordinating trainings, etc? The message is that safety is not important enough to make it more personal. The reality is that if that company spent a bit more to effectively outfit a safety team, they would likely see their incidents and risks drop enough to not just cover that cost, but improve the moral toward safety around the facility.

As my grandpa used to say, “a dollar saved is a dollar earned.” It might cost more on the balance sheets to add another Safety Specialist, implement effective safety culture programs, or increase the budget for install of new engineering controls; however, doing so to prevent that one major injury that stresses your bottom-line, puts your company in the headlines, or results in investigations and drawn out explanations to OSHA and/or your shareholders, just simply isn’t worth the risk. Having a strong safety culture is something you should be proud of. A strong safety culture that is valued and led from the top down, but appreciated and echoed at every level of an organization, not only protects your company and strengthens your foundation, but it creates a trust through employee groups that can latch itself into other parts of their business relationships. Safety is business. It is the business of investing in the safety of your employees so that they can be more productive and more effectively engaged in the present and future of your company. It is an investment that you can aggressively incorporate now with the satisfaction that the cost comes at the very least with a stronger peace of mind in the value of human life in your business.

To really invest, you must also invest yourself. You must believe what you preach and act on it. If “Safety is First” or you “Target Zero Injuries” then you must be willing to shut down when safety is threatened and show your employees you will do it yourself. You must be able to look deep into the failure of the system to hear things that maybe most companies don’t want to hear in order to understand the risks

that really exist. With renewed commitments by the Department of Justice and Department of Labor to seek out and prosecute employers that put employees in harm’s way, investing in safety has never been so vital. Poor companies do it to check a box. Many companies do it because it is the right thing to do. But, great companies take a “Don’t look good; be good” approach that shows return on their investment through lower incident rates, lower workman’s comp claims, and increased employee engagement. Strive to be good. In fact, strive to be great. As John D. Rockefeller said, "Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”

Approach safety as a business with-in your business. Work hard daily to improve your “safety product” and believe in that product. Assess its quality, invest in its success, and reward progress. Aim to understand how the business of safety truly works and is affected by the systems in place. Put a value on everything but assure everyone is valuable. Treat employees as a safety customer in which they’re always right and engaged in the future of safety at your facility. If you treat safety as a business with-in your business, both will flourish.