That same old safety program needs a re-cost, a reboot, refresh and a restart – 2. 10 action items to reduce costs.

10 simple ways to reduce your safety costs or improve implementation

Reduce your costs by investing in safety.  Every good safety leader knows that a change involves these 10 key components:

1.     Identify what you are spending money on – look at each cost and evaluate its effectiveness as well as alternatives.

2.     Find and Use Templates – in school it might be cheating, but at work its working smarter.

3.     Ask your staff – What works and what doesn’t.  Do they feel safe.  What things do they see as being useless and/or repetitive.  What are they doing and submitting that if they stopped no-one would notice? What else could they be doing to really make a difference.

4.     Drop training and data tracking costs – Use software to track everything.  Build a program once and use it often.  Then you don’t have to worry about memory or missing pieces. 

5.     Create Safety steps - this step is often the hardest as it involves a highly detail-oriented approach to creating metrics around how you will implement new initiatives, by when, and more importantly, how. Think “S.M.A.R.T” (make every goal specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound). By putting things in writing, you help set the stage for accountability, making it easier to track and report against your key performance indicators.

6.     Use your senior people to do safety instead of paperwork on safety. Determine how much of their role is paperwork and how much of it is real engagement.  It’s the 80/20 rule.  If they are spending more than 20% of their time on paperwork and data – that’s one full day per week.  Your worksite is never getting safer during the times when they are just sitting behind a desk doing paperwork.  Free up their time for more productive use.

7.     Insurance costs – review it and make sure you have what you need, but not more.

8.     Educate – let everyone know, from top-down, bottom-up and inside-out that you have a strong and robust safety plan. Let them know how you will be implementing, tracking, and reporting your staff, Executive, Board of Directors, and other stakeholders on what you do. Like hours of training, JHSC, inspections, Policies, procedures, safety meetings, etc. Encourage surveys and suggestions and where to find whistleblower information. Yes - put up those tacky safety signs – it will keep safety at top of mind!

9.     Look at different Generations differently – its easy to lose sight of the fact that times change and that could impact your employees’ needs from job training to how they adapt to using online computer requirements.

10.  Learn about Artificial Intelligence in Safety – it is or will impact your business. Stay tuned for Workhub’s next blog series on AI in Safety. AI may seem like a long way off but it will be impacting your doorstep before you know it (its already here and you may not even know it with Google maps and Netflix recommendations).  Stay ahead and learn about what’s coming.  This does not mean that you should try to be a leader in this field, but it does mean that you should understand what may be coming and so you can adjust and prepare both your company and staff accordingly.

11.  This is a bonus one - Invest in continuity – using software ensures that the knowledge and processes that you have invested in will keep on running, even if there is a change in personnel.

Conclusion

By systematically reviewing how you do safety, focusing on real improvements and fostering a safety culture, you can not only squeeze savings from your cost center but also create a safer work environment. Each dollar saved contributes to sustainable gains, improving both the bottom line and overall safety performance.  Remember that there is a cost to lack of safety as well – accidents, audits, fines and reputation.

As a bonus to the bonus - Did you know that Workhub’s simple, all-inclusive $4 per user per month Compliance management software will help you with significantly reduce your costs in both the short and long run and further enhance your safety program (with built in continuity).  Our entire Training Library is free – with over 100 hours of topical content from inspections to JHSC – covering many of the course you pay for today (you can even load your own courses).  Our customer support team is always available to help and its always free to book a demo at www.Workhub.com.

This is the second of a four-part series on how to cut safety costs safely. You can find the rest of the series at our website under “blog”.

Part 1: Start at the start.

Part 2: 10 simple ways to reduce costs.

Part 3: Saving time, effort and money.

Part 4: keeping sustainable results.