Safety leaders have long had to justify the cost of their programs and initiatives. They’ve run into difficulty calculating safety management ROI, especially when high-profile incidents don’t or rarely happen. What can they do to overcome the challenges?
Safety near misses are never costless
Safety near misses are the best place to start.
Proliferating safety events in which injury to people or damage to property don’t happen but could have aren’t costless.
Safety leaders likely know this but must communicate to the C-suite, nevertheless, that near misses indicate stresses in the system. Stresses which metastasize causing injuries, illnesses, and fatalities.
That’s when the C-suite will have to pay dearly.
How much?
Insurer estimates show that employers paid more than $1 billion per week in direct workers’ compensation costs in 2021. That comes out to $58 billion over the entire year for disabling, yet nonfatal, injuries.
Although staggering, these figures don’t include non-direct costs, such as the following:
- Training replacements
- Launching investigations
- Reactively implementing ad-hoc corrective measures
- Lost productivity
- Repairing damaged equipment and property
- Employee demoralization and absenteeism.
Factored in, those numbers are prodigious. The latest National Safety Council (NSC) estimate is $171 billion.
What, then, can be done?
Integrated safety management technology offers the best bang for your buck
As your C-suite has a clear business interest in avoiding steep safety costs, the message should be that a strong focus on worker safety, besides mitigating risk, can transform the entire organization, dramatically improving culture, quality, productivity, communication, and ultimately profits.
And that’s where safety management technology comes in. How, exactly?
Integrated risk, safety, and compliance management software can help businesses expeditiously implement best-practice safety management programs tailored to their respective risk profiles.
Here are some of the capabilities that matter:
- Risk and compliance. Avoid the cost of safety near misses and incidents and accelerate your response by considering a suite of integrated tools to collect risk data from across the organization – from a range of stakeholders, in real time, and based on international ISO standards.
- Incident management. When safety incidents do happen, integrated technology should provide underlying risk data to help teams more effectively report and manage all their environmental, health, and safety incidents. That saves time, money, and helps teams make better informed decisions.
- Mental health and wellbeing management. The mental health crisis is also turbocharging safety risk for employers. Fortunately, safety management technology can help. Integrated wellbeing management functionality can enable organizations to (1) better respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support personnel, and (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement.
Of course, these capabilities only scratch the surface.
In fact, integrated safety management software, with powerful dashboard capabilities, can itself be instrumental in calculating ROI. How so? Download our guide, Making the Business Case for Safety Management Technology, to find out.
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