As a safety practitioner, your mission is ensuring the safety and health of your people. But that mission sometimes runs into roadblocks when presented to upper management. Sometimes, to those charged with cost cutting, safety programs may be viewed as expenditures of time and money. In other cases, safety programs vie for the same resources as other programs that provide revenue or compete with regulatory solutions that are mandatory. To overcome this, a business case can help crystalize and communicate the value and potential benefits of your plan.

A solid business case for a safety program can help you to effectively convince decision-makers that your efforts will produce a strong positive return on the investment. It can make the case that safety costs are investments, not expenses. This business case can also help to stabilize an appropriate safety budget, even in difficult economic times.

Why a Business Case?

The primary aim of your health and safety program is to ensure workforce well-being and business continuity. No business owner wants his or her people to be injured, to be cited for noncompliance or even shut down completely for days. With an increasing focus on corporate social responsibility and ssustainability, executives and managers want to be assured that they’ve done everything they reasonably can to ensure a safe working environment and uninterrupted operations. But investment in safety and health, just as in any other investment, goes beyond just doing the right thing. It still needs to make good business sense. Understanding how your management defines “good business sense” can make all the difference in their receptivity to your health and safety agenda.

The business case is vitally important for health and safety because the cost of risk, both direct and indirect, are largely underestimated and many times obscured in a business’ financial statements. Often times this cost of risk is viewed only in terms of direct expenses, such as workers compensation, overlooking the indirect cost of business interruption, loss of production time, supervisory time to investigate and replace the injured worker, repair of damaged equipment and many other factors that contribute to the cost. You, as the safety practitioner, need to work with finance and other stakeholders to more completely and clearly define what incidents, injuries and illnesses are (or could be) costing your business.

And even if your management is wholly supportive of health and safety efforts and isn’t asking for a business case, it helps to put executives at ease and reinforce their trust in you. They’ll be assured in knowing you’ve thought through the issues, costs and potential for return on the investment in safety. The good documentation through a business case also provides your company with some protection from blame or liability, for example, a legal case resulting from a workplace fatality.

Position Your Business Case for Success

There are some known factors in successful business case adoption. Think through each of the following options carefully and choose what will work best for your company. Choose the appropriate tone When it comes to how you approach your business case, you essentially have three options. You can choose to emphasize negative outcomes, such as fatalities, OSHA injury and illness rates, workers compensation claims, production downtime, litigation expenses, labour replacement, property loss, regulatory penalties and absenteeism. You can choose to accentuate the positive, such as improved employee perceptions, morale, productivity, product quality, employee retention, recruiting, customer perception and satisfaction. Or you can take a balanced approach and include a combination of both. While perhaps a bit more art than science, you should use careful judgmentas to which tone will resonate most favourably with your leadership teams.

Be aware of management hot buttons and top priorities

It will be important to match safety and health benefits to management’s hot buttons and top priorities.

These may include:

• Cost savings – show that your plan can help save dollars

• Peer pressure – taking an “everyone else is doing it” or “we’re the last ones to adopt” approach

• Industry benchmarks – showing how you currently stack up to your competition or how your plan will put you further ahead

• Company reputation – how your plan can be good for public relations, attracting and retaining employees, etc.

• Prior negative experience – if management perceives prior investments as not having delivered the expected results, you may need to do more work in presenting a solid case through thorough analysis

• Reliability and consistency – you will want to support your plan with research and show how your plan will have lasting results

• Product quality – a management team that is a stickler for quality will likely want employees who are not only safe and healthy, but contributing to quality as well

• Productivity – focus on how the problem you’re trying to solve has kept employees away from work, driven work absences, increased overtime, etc.

• Community relations – if appropriate, make the connection for management between your plan and how it benefits your corporate standing in the community

• Brand image – this angle can be effective if a past incident received negative publicity

Cover each and modify your focus based on who in the organization you are talking to. Not surprisingly, one study showed that financial executives view the top benefits of a workplace safety program to be financial in nature (increased productivity, reduced costs). So tailoring your message for this group should include these types of metrics, as opposed to a more emotional appeal (right thing to do, better employee engagement, etc.).

Organize your business case

Part of what will make management more receptive to your business case will depend on your order of reasoning. Decision makers will usually prioritize their reasoning as follows.

1. ROI on productivity improvement

2. ROI on direct cost savings

3. ROI on direct and indirect cost savings (Although indirect cost savings are often challenged)

4. Improving organizational metrics

5. Reducing financial risk

6. Improving compliance

7. Aligning with corporate values

Time your presentation

The timing of your presentation is critical. While perhaps an obvious point, it’s best not to present your business case after final budgets come out. Nothing says “I’m out of touch” like requesting funds once the budgetary cycle has closed. Each company has a business planning cycle where the next fiscal year’s initiatives are outlined, resources estimated, and corresponding budgets requested. Your timing needs to correspond with this budget cycle for your organization, meaning you should be developing your case beginning at least 120 days before the new budget year begins, and perhaps even sooner if you anticipate needing to do fact-finding and research. This assumes that you fully understand where the budget dollars to be invested in safety are in the budget and what the planning and budget process is. If you don’t, be sure to do your homework.

“It is not enough to be right. You have to be right at the right time .”

Network within your company

Do not develop or present your business case in isolation. Try to garner support from business functions that relate to safety. Seek out information from other departments that you may not normally interact with. Don’t be afraid to go outside your risk management department to find out what matters to people, what alternatives might work and what range of results might be acceptable.

Don’t forget that there are financial and other business data that sit in accounting, personnel and operations departments across organizations that safety and health practitioners could use. And, in practice, health and safety is linked to human resources, personnel development, quality management, fire and security and business (financial) risk management. Interacting with these functions on a regular basis will help you see the bigger picture the way your leadership does. At the very least, these outreach efforts will help you see what the other functions do that may support yours. You may also identify a more appropriate person to actually present your case, with you supporting them. Finally, if workers are represented by a union, be sure to reach out to union representatives and include them in your planning to garner support.

What to Include in the Business Case

There are specific components you should make sure are part of your business case. They include:

• Definition of the problem and desired outcome – Describe what issues you want to solve, the evidence showing the problem exists, what it is costing the business, and what the desired outcome is you are trying to achieve with your plan

• Both direct costs or benefits of a project (medical costs, workers compensation claims cost, property damage) and the hidden costs or benefits (legal expenses, production downtime, product quality, employee morale, customer image)

• Specific ideas for practical implementation of your ideas – Examples include making it a part of individual employee performance objectives or supervisor objectives, training employees on new processes, or integrating safety into supply chain management to raise the overall bar for safety performance

• Budget – include start-up funding, operations money, and any ongoing or maintenance costs

• Program elements – estimate time, equipment and other resource drains

• Comparisons to other companies undertaking efforts similar to yours, as well as their costs and results

• Consequences for non-action, noncompliance

• Discussion of alternative solutions considered, and why they are not ideal

• List of constraints that limited your ability to gather and analyze data, as well as an explanation of your calculations and assumptions underlying the calculations

Conclusion

As one author put it, “the finest environment, health and safety program in creation does nobody any good if it stays on the wish list.” Your job as a safety practitioner is to ensure the health and safety of your company’s employees. The best way to do that is to be sure your plans are adopted and implemented. And the most effective way to accomplish that is to build a smart, factual and convincing business case based on the methods and strategies outlined here.