Making the Business Case for Safety Management Technology

Challenges to calculating safety management ROI

Safety leaders have long had to justify the cost of their programs and initiatives. They’ve run into difficulty calculating the return-on-investment of safety management when high profile incidents don’t or rarely happen.

After all, it’s typically these kinds of safety events that generate casualties, impact the wider environment, and make the nightly news.

For now, the events themselves might seem like remote possibilities to senior leadership. When they do happen, though, safety incidents unearth underlying safety issues – issues which are highly relevant in making a business case for safety management investments. 

Investigations of the events tend to reveal that:

• Employers knowingly ignored identified health and safety risks.
• Needed maintenance was deferred, often because resource costs were deemed too high.
• Business pressures superseded safety and compliance concerns. 

Safety near misses aren’t costless

At a lower boil, such issues exist in many organizations that have yet to pursue proactive safety management policies. There, lower-level safety incidents and/or near misses likely proliferate.

These incidents might not generate headlines; they do, however, extract a toll on workers and their families. Soon enough, they’ll cost employers, too.

Why’s that?

Proliferating safety events in which injury to people or damage to property don’t happen but could have signal stresses in the system. These stresses metastasize, eventually causing injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. That’s when employers pay dearly. Indeed, estimates show that employers paid more than $1 billion per week in direct workers’ compensation costs in 2021ⁱ. That comes out to $58 billion over the entire year for disabling, yet nonfatal, injuries.

Although staggering, these figures don’t include the non-direct costs of training replacements, launching investigations, reactively implementing ad-hoc corrective measures, losing productivity, repairing damaged equipment and property, and addressing the resultant employee demoralization and absenteeism.

Numbers, here, are prodigious. The latest National Safety Council (NSC) estimate is $171 billionⁱⁱ.

What’s more, according to the NSC, the total cost of fatal and nonfatal injuries per worker is $1,100, which includes the value of goods or services each worker must produce to offset the cost of work injuries. 

When it comes to back injuries alone, the cost per medically consulted injury in 2019 was $42,000; the cost per death was $1,220,000iii. That estimate includes the non-direct cost of wage losses, medical expenses, administrative expenses, and employer costs.

Integrated safety management technology to save money and mitigate risk

Employers, as such, have a clear business interest in avoiding the steep costs, whether direct or indirect.

The message to senior leaders must, therefore, 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.

Where does safety management technology come in? Integrated risk, safety, and compliance management software can help businesses expeditiously implement best-practice safety management programs tailored to their respective risk profiles.

Furthermore, integrated functionality for all stages of the risk, safety, and compliance incident lifecycle will offer senior leaders the best bang for the buck, by avoiding duplications and redundancies, providing visibility to the top and across the organization, as well as ensuring speedier incident response.

Here are the integrated capabilities to consider:

Risk and compliance

Safety incidents often stem for underlying risks. Yet, safety teams often splurge on separate safety incident and risk and compliance tools. Not only are expenses higher that way; but when incidents do happen, the systems themselves rarely share relevant information, which delays the incident response.

Avoid the cost and accelerate the 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.

Fully customizable, with everything from a simple pre-task assessment through to an organizational risk register, these tools will make it easy to capture risk data and provide the analytics to derive rich insights, keeping workers safe and businesses compliant.

Relevant tools include:

• Audits and inspections. Easily manage safety audits and inspections using a library of best-practice templates to get started fast. Safety teams can also make the templates their own by adding unique requirements and additions.
• Take 5. Provide personnel in the field a simple and easy to use tool to assess risk before tasks begin, then collate Take-5 data to gain insights into operational risks.
• Standards compliance. Monitor compliance against ISO, legislative, and industry standards. Abide by best-practice standards, including ISO 45001, ISO 27001, and more.

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.

Relevant functionality should cover the following use cases:

• Injury management. Built-in communication and collaboration features to ensure that teams can respond quickly when an injury occurs, by automatically sharing important documentation, questionnaires, and guidelines with personnel. Such an approach makes it easier for return to-work coordinators to focus on supporting the injured worker, which reduces insurance premiums by decreasing the amount of money spent returning personnel to work.
• Online inductions. Streamline the induction process by enabling inductions to be completed online, on any device. This enables teams to track the status of all inductions in one location in real time even when the inductions happen across multiple sites.
• Reporting and analytics. Empower data-driven work safety decisions across the organization using real-time analytics. Generate safety reports ad hoc or regularly and send them up to external stakeholders to prove the efficiency of your operation.

Mental health and wellbeing management

The mental health crisis is turbocharging safety risk for employers. Too often, though, wellbeing issues are falling out of the remit of safety teams.

To counter this, safety management technology should come with integrated wellbeing management functionality. That will help 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.

Here, relevant capabilities include:

• Gain situational awareness of current events impacting personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds
• Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice
• Conduct welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice
• Triage response to events
• Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
• Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
• Customize initiatives based on current events or unique organizational requirements
• Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments for distributed staff
• Enable personnel to request mental health and wellbeing support
• Direct personnel to support programs and best-practice content
• Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from HR software

Contractor management

Contractors help organizations save time and money. Contractor investments are likely to backfire, though, if hired personnel isn’t included in the host-organization’s safety protocols.

Fortunately, integrated contractor management functionality can help simplify the process and protect investments, by enabling contractors to self-register and progress through customizable workflows, to check documentation before becoming approved.

From there, contractors can then be automatically followed up on, through workflows and notifications that serve to keep the organization compliant. Once approved, contractors can be managed through their entire lifecycle from registration, insurance, and competency uploads through to induction, work order allocation, and deactivation based on unique organizational requirements. 

Other relevant tools include:

• Permit to work. Manage high-risk contractor work proactively by enabling personnel to apply for permits based on the type of work they are completing through a simple and streamlined approach. 
• Work-order management. Easily manage work order allocation and completion based on unique organizational requirements enabling personnel to raise orders, relate them to organizational structure, manage the tasks and costs associated with the work, as well as track progress to close out. 
• Contractor self-administration. Further reduce administrative load by enabling contractors themselves to register and maintain their own company details online, including competencies, tickets, and insurance, by simply scanning a QR code.

Visitor management

Thanks to the pandemic, visitor management has become an increasing part of workplace health and safety, making it incumbent on organizations to reduce COVID risk with effective visitor management protocols. Such measures are likely to include requiring visitors to answer screening questions when signing in.

Here, integrated technology can help. Tools can streamline the overall visitor sign-in process using a QR code on a form tailored to the organization.

Visitors can also complete inductions, answer questions, and acknowledge content, then have notifications triggered to their host based on the response. Once on site, safety teams can use functionality to manage visitor cards, broadcast notifications, and understand visitor trends to better optimize protocols.

 Other tools include:

• Situational awareness and reporting. Create a common operating picture via field personnel updates, GIS feeds, data import, email, and social media.
• Incident and special-event pre-planning. Prepare for emergency incidents and planned events that might impinge on staff safety through response checklists, automated notifications and escalations, and learnings from past events.
• Damage assessments. In the early stages of a disaster or emergency, capture damage reports from your field staff and from the public so that your Emergency Operations Center (EOC) can quickly assess and react.
• Exercise management. Plan and capture exercises, post-incident reviews, and lessons learned to identify areas of improvement and ensure your team is practiced, ready, and always improving.

Conclusion

Finally, senior management might consider work safety investments grudge purchases; but the fact is that when safety incidents do happen, they reflect poorly on the entire operation. Many organizations simply don’t recover.

Fortunately, business pressures don’t need to conflict with safety, risk, compliance, and wellbeing concerns. Integrated safety management software, like Noggin, can help organizations identify risks, make deferred improvements, while saving money and improving the quality of the worker experience.

Even better, safety leaders will no longer have to move heaven and earth to show the ROI of their operation. The solution can do it for them – powerful automation capabilities provide real-time insights to senior management, while configurable notifications, workflows, analytics, and mapping empower safety personnel to make better decisions wherever they are.

Sources

i. Liberty Mutual Insurance: 2021 Workplace Safety Index: the top 10 causes of disabling injuries. Available at https://business.libertymutual.com/insights/2021-workplace-safety-index-the-top-10-causes-of-disabling-injuries/.

ii. Kanner & Pinatluga: How Much Do Workplace Injuries Cost the U.S. Economy? Available at https://kpattorney.com/how-much-do-workplace-injuriescost-the-u-s-economy/.

iii. California Work Injury Law Center: Workers’ Comp for Back Injury. Available at https://cwilc.com/workers-compensation/occupational-injury/workerscomp-back-injuries/#:~:text=The%20cost%20per%20medically%20consulted,damage%20costs%20except%20motor%20vehicles.