If you need some more ammunition to convince your top management and managers throughout your organization of the value of investing dollars and time in workplace safety and health, you'll be interested in a study commissioned recently by the New Zealand Department of Labour.
Labor officials challenged a team of researchers from Massey and Auckland Universities to answer this simple, but intriguing question:
If businesses invest in health and safety, how does this contribute to their performance and productivity?
According the Department of Labour's website (www.dol.govt.nz), researchers found "compelling evidence" of many potential benefits of the links between health and safety and performance and productivity, including:
- Fewer injuries that stop people from working, interfering with production
- Increased innovation
- Improved quality
- Enhanced corporate reputation
- Lower costs to compensate workers for work-related injuries and illness
- Improved staff recruitment and retention
The study also identified a number of common success factors in businesses that demonstrate the links between work quality and productivity including:
- A high-quality working environment
- Good levels of cooperation between management and employees
- Work organization that gives employees challenges, responsibilities, and job autonomy
- The development of new working methods and equipment to improve working postures and decrease the strain of physical work
- Creative solutions for specific safety and health problems
- A thorough analysis of the different production costs that can be directly or indirectly related to health and safety hazards (costs of incidents, loss of productivity and quality, and other production costs due, for example, to the use of inadequate materials)
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