Convincing your management team to view safety, health and wellness as a business value instead of an expense can be a difficult task.
But as an EHS professional, selling safety is (or should be) part of your job description. Below are a few tips to get you started selling safety to management:
Align safety with your company’s core values
Safety can be a tangible contributor to your company’s core values and business objectives. Starting your presentation by aligning safety with your company’s key strategic objectives and values will get the attention of management and increase their commitment to making this initiative happen.
Demonstrate the problem, tell a story
Telling a story can bring your point home to the rest of management. You live and breathe safety every day – they don’t. So it helps to bring home your point by having a story they can relate to.
Providing specific examples helps to demonstrate how bad the problem is and telling the story of actual employees helps accomplish this.
Detail your solution and make the business case
After you’ve demonstrated the problem with the stories of actual employees, detail your solution and make the business case for safety.
Here are the questions you need to answer:
- What are the leading and lagging indicators of the problems you’re having?
- What is this costing your company financially and otherwise?
- How is your solution going to solve the problem?
- What are the deliverables and who will be responsible for them?
- What is the cost benefit analysis and projected ROI of the program?
- What is the plan for implementation?
- How will the program be evaluated over time and who is responsible for the outcomes?
Give your long term vision for the program
After you’ve gone through the details of the program and made the business case, come back to the story you told at the beginning of your presention. Retell the story, but from the perspective of after your new initiative has been implemented.
This time the employee is safer and healthier, the problem is solved, the company is closer to achieving its vision and business objectives, and members of management are benefiting personally from the success of the program.
Include your long term vision of the program as a whole and tie in your new program so they can see how it fits into the larger scheme of things.
Checklist for selling safety
So here you go. Here’s your 4-point checklist for selling safety:
- Align safety with your company’s core values and strategic objectives
- Demonstrate the problem by telling a story
- Detail your solution and make the financial case
- Give your long term vision and retell the story
Over to you
Have you pitched a new initiative to management lately? How did it go?
Do you have any tips we missed on selling safety? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a series titled Making the Business Case for Safety, Health, and Wellness.
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