One of the many challenges faced by Safety Professionals is the need to engage senior leaders or management at your companies and ensure that they are taking a proactive approach to Workplace Safety. While you likely possess the expertise to monitor and enhance your company’s Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) performance and understand its importance, convincing other leaders without an EHS background of the same thing requires a different skillset. Gaining the support of senior executives within your company is often the differentiating factor in the success of your EHS programs, therefore it is crucial that you are able to effectively articulate the benefits their business will bear from investing in safety. You need to be able to ‘sell’ safety investment to people with different priorities to your own.
The first and arguably most important step in doing so is ensuring you are aligned with the larger goals of your company. Begin your proposal to leadership by clearly identifying one of their pain points and demonstrating your understanding of the issues they face before explaining how EHS investment can solve it. Whether it’s reducing avoidable costs or maximizing productivity, they need to know that investing in safety will address these concerns. This approach shifts the dynamic of the proposal from merely asking for more investment in your programs to offering a solution to their problems. Because of this, you will be heard by more open minds, increasing your chances of securing funding for your programs.
With that being said, it is important to show, rather than tell, what investment in safety programs will do for the business; senior executives want to see evidence. Your proposal should include excerpts from academic articles, case studies, and safety success stories immediately after discussing any benefits. For example, in ‘Financing Constraints and Workplace Safety’, the authors present evidence showing that both positive cash flow shocks and lower workplace injury rates positively impact firm value. (Cohn & Wardlaw, 2016)
Effectively tailoring your proposal to the broader goals of the company, presenting evidence-based solutions, and clearly demonstrating their benefits will help you ‘Sell Safety’ to your leadership and improve your chances at acquiring their support. We encourage you to leverage these insights and strategies to advocate for greater investment in workplace safety within your organization.
