HOW HEALTH AND SAFETY MAKES GOOD BUSINESS SENSE - A SUMMARY OF RESEARCH FINDINGS
Looking to the future: opportunities for business and researchers
In Brief
- Both employers' attitudes and employees' behaviours need to change to reduce injuries, illnesses and deaths, and increase performance and productivity.
- Health and safety is beginning to be seen by British company directors as an essential ingredient in achieving world-class performance, as opposed to simple legal compliance.
- A wider approach to health promotion is needed that marries organisational attitudes and corporate culture with on-the-ground health and safety conditions.
- To establish whether economic benefits are being achieved, businesses need to collect relevant data on the direct and indirect costs of their OHS interventions, including employee data, workplace data and intervention data.
- Among the first things needed are baseline measures and tools that are fundamental, relevant and able to provide senior managers with better understanding of the full cost burden of illness and injury within their own firms, and the value of health and safety prevention/intervention strategies.
- These productivity measures must become more accessible and available uniformly across industries.
- Many research opportunities exist, especially in defining the New Zealand experience.
This literature review has established the costs and causes of workplace injuries, illnesses and deaths, and some of the challenges researchers face in trying to measure the business benefits of applying health and safety interventions. It also summarises some of the literature that provides evidence of a link between health and safety and the business benefits.
This final section provides a summary of where businesses and researchers can best direct their efforts for on-going business improvements and investigations.
Opportunities for business
When introducing health and safety measures to increase productivity, the emphasis is often on changing employees' behaviour rather than employers' attitudes. In fact, both are required.
As discussed previously, research suggests that employers typically underestimate the cost of the OHS problem, while overestimating the costs of its remedy. However, a study on the attitudes of British company directors shows boardroom views are evolving away from treating OHS as simply legal compliance, towards seeing it as a competitive advantage and an essential ingredient in achieving world class performance.2 This area requires further exploration and investigation in the New Zealand context.
"If we are to make in-roads into the damage that poor OHS management does to the economy... then issues around the relationship between wider corporate culture, safety culture and firm performance are [important]." (Smallman and John, 2001:237)
In order to enhance workplace productivity through health and safety programmes, organisations need to:
- combine business targets and human resources activities, in order to achieve better results
- take a wider approach to health promotion to include not only health conditions, but also employee attitudes and corporate culture - a good illustration of this approach is the health and productivity management (HPM) approach, which offers a range of programmes that employees may access when sick, injured or balancing work/life issues
- use a suite of OHS improvement programmes, rather than only specific prevention measures
- include technical innovations and organisational improvements
- carry out measurement and evaluation to demonstrate a return on investment, both prospectively and retrospectively.
Collecting relevant data
One way businesses can determine whether or not there have been economic benefits following an OHS intervention is to gather data on the direct and indirect costs from a range of sources, namely:
- employee data - this includes the number of employees, their working time and wages, overtime, training and production costs
- workplace data - this includes supervisory costs, recruitment, insurance, and other general overheads, maintenance, waste, and energy use
- intervention data - this relates to the costs associated with the intervention, for example, consultants' fees, disruptions and errors.
The data categories listed above are intended to answer the question: "Has optimal productivity been achieved?" If the answer is "no", then the next questions are: "Why" and "What else can be done?" There may be a number of reasons for lower than optimum productivity, such as an ill-conceived timeframe. Other examples of health and safety contributors to lower than optimum productivity include:
- unhealthy physical and/or mental stress
- too few breaks
- badly designed or outdated equipment
- poor lighting or ventilation
- uncomfortable seating
- poor supervision
- poor job design
- lack of worker participation.
It is important to ensure that productivity data is relevant to the OHS intervention and includes both quantitative and qualitative data. Resources must be allocated to do this, and that can be a challenge for small businesses in particular.
Opportunities for research
Developing consistent and accessible measurement tools
A first step in establishing the link between health, safety and productivity is determining which baseline measures and tools are fundamental, relevant and able to provide senior managers with better understanding of the full cost burden of illness and injury within their own firms, and the value of health and safety prevention/intervention strategies. Basic metrics need to be identified that can be used:
- as national and international benchmarks for assessing health and safety related productivity (HSRP)
- to quantify the fiscal impact of health and safety on the firm's bottom line.
Once identified, accepted measures of productivity must become more accessible and available uniformly across industries. They are likely to include counting sick days, or productivity measurement techniques (such as piece rates, or time and motion studies used in manufacturing environments). These measures can help determine statistical relationships with health and safety risks and conditions.
While data on productivity can be collected through various means (self-reporting, archival sources, or mixed methods), in terms of validity, archival data is the preferred source, as self-reporting is based on the subjective experience of the employer or employee.
The relationship between safety climate and safety culture
Within the discipline of occupational medicine/health promotion, further research is needed on the relationships between safety climate and organisational climate. While some work has been done at a conceptual level on the differences and similarities between organisational climate and safety climate, a thorough investigation of the relationship between safety climate and safety culture is required.
Methodological criteria for evaluating health and safety interventions and preventions
An opportunity exists to assess the impact of health and safety preventions and interventions on workplace productivity against robust and consistent criteria. One suggestion for those criteria is outlined below.
1.Programme objectives and conceptual basis:
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5. Qualitative data: • Were qualitative methods used to supplement quantitative data? |
2. Study design:
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6. Threats to internal validity:
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3. External validity:
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7. Statistical analysis:
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4. Outcome measurement
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8. Conclusions:
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A comprehensive overview of the various prevention and intervention programmes, and their permutations, is available at www.injurypreventionthesaurus.com
Questions for on-going investigation
Finally, the literature review identified the following questions for on-going investigation:
- Are the benefits of health and safety interventions and preventions short- or long-term?
- Does reducing injuries and illnesses automatically influence productivity gains as well as reducing productivity losses?
- How challenging will it be to get employers, particularly small businesses, to link health and safety measures with tangible increases in productivity and profits?
- What is the New Zealand business experience? Does it differ between large and small organisations, and does it differ from that in other parts of the world, such North America?
- Given that the literature on linking occupational health and safety with productivity concentrates on ergonomics and promoting occupational medicine and health, how does safety fit into the equation? What would a more multidisciplinary approach deliver?
- What are the links between workplace safety and health, and the sociology and organisation of work and productivity? How do OHS policy and practice, and productivity gains sit within the context of changes in the business environment - such as the changes to the way we work, changes to the legal framework, demographic changes and increased globalisation?
2 The findings of Smallman and John (2001) are also supported by earlier studies by Bond (1999) and Warrack and Sinha (1999), and the approach adopted by the European Foundation for Quality Management (1996), outlined in their Model for Business Excellence.