A new tool designed to calculate the value of safety to any organisation could help strengthen the business case for OSH initiatives but also sell the benefits of a more holistic view of employee care and protection, says Louis Wustemann.

The financial numbers usually cited to impress on us the importance of good safety management – and the cost of failure - are massive. An estimated 4 per cent of the world’s annual gross domestic product is lost to workplace accidents and diseases – costing the global economy around £4 trillion in 2021. In the UK, the annual cost is around £30 billion. But the sheer size of these figures can make them hard to grasp and even weaken their impact, since they are hard to relate to individual workplaces. And they don’t help safety professionals in making a case to directors for increased local investment in protective measures.

Recent research could help change that. The New Value of Safety project by the National Safety Council in the US, funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF), a charity that supports risk research and education, has created calculators that help put a cost and value on safety performance at business or even site level. At the same time as stepping the focus down to organisations, the New Value of Safety simultaneously broadens the scope of the value calculation of good safety to take in the benefits to individuals and wider society and to increase the range of organisational gains. This increased scope makes it especially valuable to anyone trying to value safety as a component of sustainability management or environment, social and governance (ESG) measurement and reporting.

Karen McDonnell, RoSPA’s Occupational Health and Safety Policy Adviser, says that this expanded set of valuation criteria, including putting a monetary estimate on reputational value and employee retention gains from good safety, are exciting. They create the potential not just to build a stronger business case for health and safety interventions but to promote a wider conversation in organisations. “The model really provides an opportunity for our members to see what value means and take a whole-organisation approach”, she says. “It would appeal not just to OSH professionals but employee reps and HR people.”

First step

The NSC project draws on a previous study, also funded by LRF, titled Value of Safety by researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The researchers reviewed 3,685 academic papers and surveyed 13 safety professionals. They identified a set of dimensions of value that good OSH management adds to business: health value, environmental value, economic value, sustainability value, ethics value, resilience value, political value and reputation value.

The study found that the first three areas – health, economic and environmental value, were the only ones that had been covered in any detail by previous research and that even in these, there were gaps such as the lack of any allowance for mental health in the assessment of health value.

The researchers developed a broad conceptual model that proposed organisations define and measure the different safety values to their stakeholders – including the public and supply chains as well as direct employees - then design safety systems to maximise those values.

New value added

The New Value of Safety project is built on the value categories identified by the Delft study, tweaking the political value category to the broader concept of societal value. The NSC identified a range of outcomes that demonstrate the value of good safety management, from improved quality of life for employees through better business continuity and resilience, to increased sense of belonging to an organisation.