It’s clear investors are paying more attention to organizations’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, but a company’s safety culture can factor into the equation as well—especially when it comes to reputation.
You can’t put a price tag on human safety, of course, but that doesn’t mean incidents don’t have a cost. Besides potential legal bills, insurance, regulatory penalties, etc., the average cost of downtime is $260,000 per hour, according to Aberdeen Group.
The time to address your safety culture is now.
What if I told you there was a place where there were 23,000 deaths recorded among a workforce of 38 million people? You’d undoubtedly be highly concerned about those numbers—and rightfully so.
If I told you those statistics were from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1913, you’d probably say that makes much more sense. After all, that was then; things have changed so much, right? In many ways, of course, they have. In others, they haven’t changed as much as you think.
What if I told you there was also a place where 2.78 million workplace-related deaths were recorded in a single year? You’d undoubtedly be concerned to hear this significant number.
But what if I also told you there is a place where those numbers do exist? That would be the current situation at our workplaces across the globe. The huge number is the estimated worldwide total of workplace-related deaths from accidents and diseases each year, according to the International Labour Organization.
We can and we must do better.
One of the several criteria EHS Today uses to compile its annual “America’s Safest Companies” list is “evidence that prevention of incidents is the cornerstone of the safety process.”
I couldn’t agree more. For generations, companies looked to lagging indicators after incidents occurred to try to prevent future incidents, but we at Sphera believe that leading indicators are much more important to help prevent an incident from ever even taking place. With the proper software and systems in place as well as data and expertise, predictive and prescriptive safety measures can be easily implemented to enhance or advance your safety culture.
Organizations are more complex than ever, and those complexities can lead to more incidents and near-misses. But I don’t have to tell you that; you already know it. Still, we’d like to learn more about safety in your organization. Sphera recently launched our new Safety survey that includes health and safety, Process Safety Management/Operational Risk Management (PSM/ORM) questions to better understand organizations’ complete safety culture status.
I invite you to take the survey. We will protect one acre of threatened rainforest for every person who takes it, and we look forward to sharing the results with you later this year.
2021 Safety Survey
Now in its sixth year, Sphera has reimagined our PSM/ORM survey to include even more safety-related areas. We invite you to take part in this year’s survey.