For many companies, the word “performance” is an indicator of profits and losses and has no relationship to occupational safety and health. For others, safety and health “performance” is an indicator of how many people did or did not get hurt the prior year without much thought to the impact on the bottom line. Both perspectives are short sighted and miss a critical business case that can be made for safety and health beyond moral or altruistic reasons. 

Demonstrating the value of safety to management is often a challenge because the return on investment (ROI) can be difficult to measure. While it is certainly easier to calculate an ROI when the newly purchased resource makes more widgets, it is not as easy to directly correlate a prevented accident to resources spent on safety. 

However, workplaces that implement safety and health management systems can reduce their illness and injury costs by 20 to 40 percent according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). When you consider that employers in the United States pay almost $1 billion weekly for direct workers’ compensation costs alone (a cost that comes directly out of company profits), the potential savings to be had by implementing a safety and health management system is not chump change. 

For far too long, safety and health has been about programs developed as a knee-jerk reaction to requirements and not as a proactive measure to protect workers. Without integration into business practices and lacking a champion, these reactions are not sustainable. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued voluntary safety and health program management guidelines in 1989 to encourage employers to do more to protect their employees, but the safety and health program management concept is only now gaining traction. 

OSHA’s approach consists of four basic guidelines: Management Commitment & Employee Involvement; Worksite Analysis; Hazard Prevention & Control; and Safety & Health Training. Each of these guidelines has several embedded guidelines to help the user along with the process. This model lays the foundation for what OSHA sees as a successful safety and health program and the backbone for the Voluntary Protection Program.

Other models exist that rely heavily on process development and documentation. Each has its own merits and can provide a model by which a company can develop their own effective system of safety and health management. 

Industry studies report that companies focused on safety as a core business strategy come out ahead financially. To learn more about how a safety and management system can impact your business’s bottom line beyond compliance, attend the Georgia Tech Learning Series on February 12 from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. There, you’ll learn how to manage safety like a business function; how to mitigate risk; and how to develop a systematic approach to safety and health management that benefits your worker beyond worker safety.

James Howry is a principal research associate with the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Safety and Health Consultation Program and an instructor at the OSHA Training Institute Education Center. He received an M.S. in management from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in criminal justice from University of Nebraska-Lincoln.