That same old safety program needs a re-cost, a reboot, refresh and a restart – 4. Keeping sustainable results.

That same old safety program needs a re-cost, a reboot, refresh and a restart – 4. Keeping sustainable results.

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day, teach them to fish and they have food for life.  To lock in changes and savings leading to enhance safety, consider a structured approach:

1. Monitor and Measure

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Establish safety KPIs (e.g., incident rates, near-misses) to track progress and identify areas for improvement.  Metrics do matter.  It keeps a long memory of what was to be accomplished and when.  Its interesting how old sayings seem to make sense and in this case the saying is “what gets measured gets managed”.
• Regular Reviews: Conduct periodic reviews of safety performance and financial impacts to adjust strategies as needed.  Share results loudly.  Everyone should know if targets were hit or missed and celebrated accordingly.  This lets people know that it matters.

2. Foster a Safety Culture

• Recognize Contributions: Acknowledge and reward teams for meeting safety goals, creating a positive reinforcement loop.
• Open Communication: Encourage open dialogue about safety concerns and ideas for improvement, fostering a culture of transparency.  Everyone loves a good story, especially when it saves lives!

3. Invest in Preventative Measures

• Proactive Maintenance: Implement regular maintenance schedules for equipment to prevent accidents and reduce long-term repair costs.
• Safety Audits: Conduct regular safety audits to identify and address potential hazards before they result in incidents.  Nobody likes the word audit!  Having someone go around and how they need to find stuff to justify the audit.  Pivot so that you do go through the checklist but also ask them for their thoughts on ways that things could go wrong and discuss those.  Doing an audit is the cake but understanding the audit is the icing.

Conclusion

Highlight how safety incidents affect overall expenses and reputation.

By systematically reviewing costs, engaging employees, prioritizing safety investments, 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.

By this fourth part of this series you must know that Workhub provides a simple, all-inclusive $4 per user per month Compliance management software system.  This will help monitor and measure your safety programs, help foster a safety culture, and finally, drive preventative measures to enhance your safety program.  Our customer support team is always available to help and its always free to book a demo at www.Workhub.com.

This is the final article 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.