Safety professionals usually bring an altruistic spirit to their jobs. They want to keep people safe because they value the well-being of people.

But most safety professionals are also painfully aware that keeping people safe just because it’s the right thing to do doesn’t get a lot of traction at budgeting time. It’s not that management doesn’t value the company’s personnel, but their focus is on return on investment. They tend to view safety as an expense rather than a profit initiative.

So your job becomes convincing the folks who control the purse strings that being safer and being more profitable go hand in hand. How do you do that? By developing a formal business case. When you demonstrate with numbers that your safety proposals will be financially beneficial, you’ll get their attention.

You can easily find examples of business cases online, with plenty of advice on how to compose and format them. But to get you started, here are seven tips that apply to making the business case for safety investment.

1. Understand how management thinks. How do they define a “good business decision?” Do they already understand the value of safety, or are you going to have to prove it to them? How do they view you? If they think of you as someone who doesn’t “get business” because your job isn’t primarily business management, you can earn their respect and appreciation by demonstrating to them upfront that you understand the specific business pressures they’re facing (e.g., current financial performance, market forces, economic conditions, supplier issues).

2. Work with your organization’s financial professionals and other stakeholders to clearly define the costs of incidents and injuries. Engage a broad group of people to get all perspectives on what the costs really are. Be sure to go beyond obvious expenses like property damage and worker’s comp to include indirect costs such as business disruption, productivity losses, worker replacement costs, and administrative and management time. Also work with finance to gauge potential costs for non-compliance and liability exposure.

3. Develop a cost/benefit analysis (i.e., economic analysis) for the safety investments you’re proposing. Once you have identified and quantified ALL the costs, you can then determine the benefits of taking certain safety initiatives to reduce those costs. With this information, you can prepare a standard cost/benefits analysis so that management can clearly see the business logic of the investment. If needed, and if possible, enlist the help of finance to develop this analysis.

4. Be realistic with your numbers. You can give a best-case scenario, but don’t make that the only possibility you present. You will have much more credibility if you also give a worst-case scenario. In between those two scenarios, you can sandwich the “most likely” scenario. You may be optimistic that you’ll come closer to the best-case scenario, but you don’t want to seem like you’re naively optimistic, or even misleading, by solely presenting numbers that management is likely to believe are overstated.

5. Don’t forget to include the intangibles. While focusing on hard numbers, you can’t talk about safety without also discussing intangible costs. By definition, these costs are impossible to quantify, but they can be the most substantial for the long-term success of a business, and you should discuss them in your business case. These intangible costs include damage to brand, negative effects on relationships with regulatory bodies, loss of business partners and customers, and lowered employee morale.

6. Address counterarguments. In your written business case, and as you present it, don’t gloss over reasonable arguments against your proposals. Bring them up yourself. By acknowledging that you’re aware of those arguments, you give your argument more credibility. And when hard questions come—or you’re faced with outright opposition—you’ll be ready!

7. Remember that winning support for a budget request involves people.  Even with hard numbers and logic on your side, you can still come away with insufficient funding if you fail at the “people skills” aspect of winning over people to your side. You have to make management believe in you and trust you. It really helps if they like you, so work at it! It may not even be a bad idea to bring in someone to champion your case for you. If you can get an admired person within management on your side, they can possibly be more persuasive than you ever could be.

Takeaway

When trying to secure funding for a safety program—such as using The Checker inspection checklist books or inspection management software—you need more than the principle that safety is the right thing to do. You need to demonstrate with a well-reasoned business plan that your proposals will bring financial value to the organization.

Image courtesy of Dave Dugdale, Wikimedia Commons.