Health and safety investments are not soley about dollars spent. Rather its about targeting health and safety spend so it is effective (optimises safety and ensures compliance) and strategic (enhances the business). Understanding health and safety cost is essential for organisations aiming to make informed decisions.
At face value, implementing safety measures, training, equipment, and maintaining compliance do drive direct costs that impact the bottom line. So targeting health and safety spending is critical to the success of a business. So targeting spending is critical.
Sources of waste
Throwing money at generic safety programs, hiring more HSE staff to create work for
themselves, purchasing unnecessary or inappropriate equipment, or conducting
irrelevant training can fail to genuinely improve safety while still incurring costs.
Spending on minor issues while neglecting major, high-probability, high-impact risks is a
poor allocation of funds. Only spending on safety after an incident occurs (e.g., legal
fees, compensation, fines) is often far more expensive than proactive prevention.
So what is “spending on the right things”?
Identify and invest in the critical risks: Health and safety, like any other investment, is a
matter of balancing priorities – so focus on the things with highest likelihood and
potential severity.
Monitoring: controls need regular monitoring to ensure they are still in place and
effective. Make this a priority. And make people on the floor responsible for doing this.
Review your HSE processes: if it is not adding value, ditch it. A chemicals register is not
required for 6 substances on site. An incident register is not needed for two events a
year. An HSE meeting is not required with a team of 3.
Dump the HSE team: permanent HSE positions may make you feel someone is looking
after HSE but all positions make work for themselves. Is a dedicated resource really the
way to go?
In essence we advocate for smart, strategic, and data-driven safety investments rather
than simply spending for the sake of it or hanging an HSE officer sign on someone’s
door. It’s about maximizing the impact of every dollar spent on safety to truly protect the
businesses people and assets.