To implement a safety program and solutions, you first need to secure buy-in from leadership to get that investment. Persuading leadership to provide a budget can be a challenge as safety solutions are often not seen as a high enough priority.
However, inaction can cost much more. You risk financial, legal, and reputational damage. In this blog, we’ll examine how to convince leadership that safety investment is key for your business.
Before building your case, consider the priorities of the executive team. Most executives are primarily concerned with ROI for any campaign or new initiative. They’re also hyper-aware of being compliant with industry and regulatory requirements. These can include OSHA’s lone working rules or state legislation such as NY RWSA or CA SB553. They must also consider risk mitigation to reduce threats to business and employee productivity.
So, you need to align your safety program with leadership’s concerns and the company's goals. These targets may include revenue and profitability, company efficiency and productivity, as well as employee retention and satisfaction.
Safety programs can uphold and promote all the goals that leadership tends to have, and we’ll help you prove it to them.
Your next step is to collect relevant data to build reports to show leadership. Clear, data-backed arguments will make a huge difference in getting approval. The key safety metrics to analyze are incident reports, equipment or personnel downtime, and the cost of injuries (sick leave, sick pay, possibly temporary cover).
You can also compare your company’s safety metrics against industry benchmarks and regulatory standards to check your business’s performance. This comparison can make a massive difference to your arguments.
You can also collate case studies of companies in your industry that have benefited from safety investments. The other necessary calculation that is essential is the projected ROI of your program, including reducing the company’s liability, increasing efficiency, and lowering insurance costs,
While boosting your new idea for a safety program, you should also highlight the costs of not implementing it. These can include clear, direct costs, including medical expenses, litigation costs, property damage, and fines. But there are also less obvious indirect costs, including:
You should also provide relevant statistics about occupational safety issues and risks to emphasize the importance of a safety program for your company. Use OSHA or other industry reports to illustrate your points.
For instance, did you know that the ILO reported that 395 million workers worldwide sustain a non-fatal work injury each year? Also, in 2022, the NSC reported that $167 billion was spent across the USA on worker injuries. Finally, the UN announced that almost 2 million people die from work-related deaths annually worldwide.
Now that you have all your evidence, you need to adjust it to be presentable in the leadership’s language: the bottom line.
Consider how safety impacts the company’s revenue: An increase in employee morale typically increases productivity as workers feel protected and cared for. Having the correct safety equipment and training also supports operational excellence and efficiency.
In addition to those two benefits, a comprehensive safety program protects the business against future regulatory changes.
Leadership is often concerned about budget constraints, disruptions or changes to current operations, and doubts about the program's ROI. Rather than waiting for leadership to raise their questions and objections, you should proactively address these potential issues with data and real-world examples. Instead of saying what you think, use concrete examples and numbers showing how to work around these potential problems or how they don’t matter.
Common questions that leadership asks:
Rather than waiting for leadership to raise concerns, address the most common objections directly. If cost is a concern, emphasize how investing in safety reduces liability, minimizes downtime, and can lower insurance premiums over time. You can also mention the option to start with a pilot phase to evaluate impact before committing to a full rollout.
When integration is questioned, clarify that most modern safety solutions are designed to work with existing systems and workflows. Highlight that implementation support, training, and change management resources are typically included to ease the transition.
To ensure the success of your presentation and program, you need to get the buy-in of other teams, including department heads, HR, compliance teams, and front-line workers.
Ask yourself:
These stories make a big difference. Using real-life safety challenges that frontline managers and teams face turns a business case into a human one. You can highlight how a worker safety program can help them set standards, manage risks, empower workers, and improve communication across teams and up the chain.
Finally, to show a scalable solution and facilitate approval, you should divide your safety program into implementation phases to facilitate approval. These stages could be organized by department, starting with the most risky area and proceeding through each department in the company. Otherwise, you could also begin with safety training before implementing clear processes and procedures.
You can also showcase the available safety technology, including lone worker devices or apps, which can help automate and facilitate more secure working procedures and increase cost efficiency. Before presenting to leadership, you should have identified one or two safety technology companies that can support your company with complete support, training, and integrations with systems you might already use.
At this stage, leadership should already have access to relevant vendor information. Ensure your proposal includes complete packages, case studies, recorded demos, pricing, and integration guides. This helps eliminate uncertainty and shortens the decision timeline.
Aware360 provides the technology and response network to keep lone and at-risk workers safe through scalable, compliant, and easy to use technological solutions. We are the perfect partner for implementing a safety plan to protect your company's at-risk and lone employees. We provide proactive safety solutions, wearable safety devices, and lone worker apps that support workers.
We’re ready to answer any questions you or your company’s leadership may have. To learn more about how Aware360 can support your organization to implement safety solutions, get in touch with us.