BCSP Viewpoints: Create buy-in for safety by developing a business case

Through formal education, experience and professional certifications, safety professionals benefit from a wealth of skills and technical expertise that allow them to recognize hazards, evaluate risk and implement effective controls to protect people, property and the environment. However, one of the skills they need most is the ability to sell safety to organizational stakeholders.

Selling safety – or creating buy-in for it – consists of the ability to have influential conversations, the identification of safety’s value and the alignment of safety’s value to the motivations of the stakeholders who hold the power (and often the wallet) needed for successful implementation of safety solutions. Because the value of safety often needs to be communicated in terms of money, time and productivity, safety pros must also learn how to build effective business cases for safety. How should they do that?

Safety pros must start by identifying and qualifying opportunities for improvement. Both formal and informal hazard recognition processes can help identify these opportunities, but they still must be qualified. By incorporating worker and management feedback, risk assessment, and prioritization – and even organizational goals – safety pros can ensure the opportunities they’ve identified are real, aligned with the motivations of the workforce and the broader organization, and positioned to have a meaningful impact on workplace safety.

Documenting every part of this process allows for qualitative and quantitative data that helps bolster the return on investment needed for a strong business case. The ROI simply explains the positive value of the proposed solution. In terms of money, start by evaluating the costs of injuries using OSHA’s Safety Pays Program, the Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index or the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts database. However, incidents at the organizational level aren’t guaranteed, so cost avoidance doesn’t provide the strongest foundation for ROI.

ROI is more tangible when it can demonstrate immediate gains to the things that keep an operation doing what it’s supposed to do, such as employee engagement. Safety pros may need to look beyond the data they can locate online to find these numbers, but they’ll be able to create a much stronger business case.

Safety pros don’t necessarily need to construct their business cases alone. In fact, as most safety solutions require purchasing products and services, many distributors, suppliers and vendors already have the tools to calculate ROI for their solutions. Safety pros would do well to lean on these resources to help construct their proposal.

Additionally, safety pros may not be well versed in concepts such as profit and loss, accounts payable, shareholder gains, procurement, supply chain, and the cost of a single purchase order, but they can take advantage of the expertise of internal and external stakeholders who do. By developing positive relationships with these people, safety pros can easily learn the business, keep their initiatives in check and build effective business cases.

Constructing a business case for safety isn’t a task to be taken lightly. Ideally, business cases check for wasted resources, prioritize the right solutions and prepare the safety pro to have meaningful conversations with the right stakeholders at the right time. The most effective business cases demonstrate ROI with immediate gains that safety pros glean from internal and external partners.