3 easy steps to profitable Health & Safety

Great Health & Safety management isn’t just about staying compliant and passing inspections – it can help boost your profits too.

There’s proven to be a positive correlation between a company’s Health & Safety performance and their financial performance. In the nineties, a construction company logged the financial performance of their construction sites against their Health & Safety performance and found that poor safety performance was a pre-cursor to poor financial performance. If the safety performance of a site dipped consecutively, a financial audit of that site was undertaken.

Businesses can often get lost among all the regulations and focus solely on compliance, failing to recognise how great Health & Safety management can actually benefit their business. By ensuring that your business is a safe place to work in, you’ll experience less work-related injuries which mean you could start to see a reduction in sickness absence, see better morale and in-turn, see an increase in productivity.

Lead the way to changing habits:

Human beings are energy saving devices (no-one ever shows you the long way to do something). When you start a job, you are trained to do it correctly and safely. In time you either learn or get shown by a ‘helpful’ colleague, the shortcuts to save you time. Unfortunately, these short cuts often aren’t safe, which means by carrying them out you can put your safety – as well as your colleagues and the business– at risk.

How can you avoid this? One way is to observe colleagues’ behaviour and correct it. Since it’s your habit, you won’t see it, just like you don’t know that you chew noisily but your partner hates it! Ask others to check your habits against the safe procedure regularly and correct any differences. The caveat to this is that sometimes our amendments to working procedures are safer, ensure these are captured too!

Improving employee engagement:

If your employees are better engaged they are more likely to follow process and less likely to cut corners. If more employees are engaged, then others are likely to follow – how often have you walked into a workplace and seen everyone wearing a hard hat and wondered where yours is?

Training:

It’s important to remember, that safety is no more the absence of injuries than quality is the absence of complaints. Ensuring your staff have the correct training for the work they’re carrying out, helps to provide you with increased confidence whilst empowering your employees to feel secure and trust in the process.

Citation’s Director of Health & Safety, Lee Mills says

“There is a Swedish proverb ‘Luck never gives, it only lends’…if you walk past a colleague working unsafely and say or do nothing, whether you like it or not, you are encouraging that unsafe behaviour. One day, that unsafe behaviour could cause your colleague to have a serious, life changing injury. Have the courage to stop and challenge (in a polite way) unsafe behaviours – you might just save someone’s life.”

If you’d like to benefit from fast, pragmatic, practical advice which can really add value to your business, contact our team on 0345 844 1111 today.