Scalable injury prevention: safety assurance is a key business advantage.

PREVENTING ON-THE-JOB ILLNESSES AND INJURIES HAS always been an important goal for companies, but recent trends suggest that it is about to become an even higher business priority.

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Global competition is fierce and companies are seeking every possible source of competitive advantage. Companies now consider human capital as a key business advantage. They are doing everything possible to keep their employees healthy, productive, and on the job. This means they are no longer willing to accept preventable work-related injuries and the associated lost time as just the cost of doing business. It is easy to see why. The direct cost of on-the-job in juries is estimated to be 14 percent to 16 percent of payroll. Indirect costs, including lost productivity, employee replacement costs, poor morale, record-keeping, and other administration costs, conservatively can add up to three times that much. Add in the cost of workers on the job who are not fully functioning because of illness or injury--so-called presenteeism--and the cost of these incidents is even greater.

Injury prevention can also be viewed in terms of shareholder value creation. In addition to the short-term benefits in the form of improved margins, fewer business interruptions, and better customer service, injury prevention can also create long-term benefits by improving the value of human capital through higher retention and productivity.

Internal changes in many organizations are also making the time ripe for focusing on injury prevention. The combination of more robust technology and improved business process management (BPM) has created fertile ground for injury prevention programs. Indeed, the intersection of technology and BPM is critical to managing the data required to focus injury prevention efforts effectively because these systems allow the organization to learn by capturing a baseline of performance and measuring subsequent improvements.

Many companies have also begun to explore using enterprise risk management solutions that allow them to view, manage, and mitigate business risks on a holistic rather than piecemeal basis. Executives throughout these companies are becoming more deeply involved in risk management and are assuming more responsibility and have more accountability for managing risks effectively than ever before. As a result, they are looking at risk across the organization and seeking ways to be more aggressive in controlling those risks and their related costs.

Across the enterprise

With hundreds or thousands of employees, jobs, processes, and procedures and tens of thousands of factors contributing to workplace injuries, creating a comprehensive injury prevention program that can manage all this can be a daunting prospect. This is particularly true for companies that are still using paper- or spreadsheet-based systems to manage their health and safety activities.

However, companies can manage that complexity by implementing a scalable injury prevention program. In order for an injury prevention program to be scalable, it must set priorities based on which efforts will yield the greatest benefits. Steps include gathering, analyzing, acting on, and measuring a continuous flow of data from across the organization. When this process is in place, risk can be compared across the organization, the highest risks can be prioritized, and resources can be allocated based on these new priorities for risk reduction.

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Technology enables scalability. The most successful technology-based injury prevention programs are customized to the specific organization according to a host of factors, including its size, goals, culture, and geography. That means that the program, its data collection, and its supporting technology should be flexible enough to accommodate the variability of internal processes, the organization's unique attributes, and its general ways of doing business. The more data the program can collect that reflects the company's real needs and circumstances, the more effective the injury prevention effort will be.

When this data collection occurs, the system becomes populated with the many types of risk that occur in the modern workplace, including repetitive body motion, working at heights, chemical/environmental risks, stored energy, and electrical risks. Without a system that brings all these risks together in one place, an organization is likely to rely on multiple experts who focus on tasks that have a high probability of severe injury but a relatively low probability of occurring, instead of tasks that have a moderate probability of injury and a higher probability of occurring. For example, by redesigning or eliminating the task that requires a worker to lift a 20-pound replacement part 20 times while standing on a six-foot ladder for two hours in a room with 103 decibels of noise, an electrical disconnect, and lock-out block-out 50 yards away, the organization can eliminate a huge amount of risk that might have otherwise not been dealt with.

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The power of a scalable injury prevention program also lies in its ability to leverage what has already been discovered and learned about injury prevention in every part of the organization. By using a technology-based approach, an organization learns by formally establishing a baseline of performance against which to measure enhancements. This makes it possible to compare risks from one area or job to another and to see what steps have been taken to address those risks. This way, if one area of the company has successfully taken steps to reduce injuries, other areas may be able to emulate or adapt that approach to fit a different situation. This type of internal benchmarking and best practice sharing can help any injury prevention program gain important momentum.

With a proactive focus, a scalable injury prevention program can also provide employees with personalized communication and information about risk avoidance and mitigation based on each employee's level and type of risk. This way, employees have the information and insights they need to make changes in their work approach themselves without any expert intervention. For example, when a company sets up storerooms/stockrooms, the best practice for reducing body motion injuries is to create a storage plan based on the weight and frequency items retrieved. This involves labeling the shelves and making sure that they are used and maintained in accordance with the standard. Employers may conduct in-person training or communicate via email to ensure that employees comply with best practices.

In addition, managers and supervisors can receive information about potential opportunities to mitigate risk among their employees, and receive reports on the effectiveness of current risk-mitigation activities. If the data reveals that certain jobs or processes are driving losses from injury, this information can be funneled to the right people so they can make changes and modifications to prevent future injuries.

By identifying and strengthening a company's existing business processes and leveraging emerging technology, companies can create scalable programs that enhance injury prevention efforts. However, the technology is only as good as its ability to meet the changing needs of a specific organization. Without that capability, there is little point in using technology to support an injury prevention program. Companies are best served when they evaluate technology for managing injury prevention programs based on whether it focuses on BPM.

Business process management

Since a scalable injury prevention program represents a new way of identifying and managing job-related risks, it needs to be supported with stronger business processes. Focusing on BPM is important for making injury prevention management more efficient across multiple people, jobs, and geographies.

Using BPM, companies can systematically integrate a set of activities to optimize business processes or adapt them to new organizational needs. Because employees' work habits change significantly every six months or so, the fifth largest global energy company regularly gathers new information about those work habits using its BPM software. The company then uses that information to update risk calculations and to ensure that it is focusing injury prevention efforts on high-risk employees.

In another situation, a company can use new or enhanced business processes to improve the method and speed with which it identifies at-risk individuals for on-the-job injury or illness. In this case, a company can use BPM to manage activities related to the identification of risk-for-injury factors and the distribution of solutions to supervisors and health and safety staff to help employees avoid those injuries.

This BPM-supported approach often requires some level of process improvement. To achieve that improvement, a company should begin by deciding what metrics are necessary to determine the injury prevention program's success, then identify the processes most critical to achieving success and highlight any opportunities for improving those processes.