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Many safety pros still struggle to show the value of safety to top executives; many stop at reducing “bad” numbers such as incidents.

That way it’s difficult to align safety with strategic business goals; safety will always be regarded as a cost center.

A new metric can help safety pros move from measuring - and trying to reduce - the bad to having an impact on a company’s strategic “good,” such as employee health and well-being, and better customer and supplier safety.

Following the new metric allows safety pros to get buy-in and behavioral change from workers, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce risk enterprise-wide.

The metric, Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), was outlined to the Professional Conference on Industrial Hygiene by Beth Beloff, Golder Associates (bbeloff@golder.com).

The system walks safety pros through six steps to align their own metrics with existing company data to prove value:

1. understand the context
2. assess issues and prioritize
3. develop key objectives
4. define key performance indicators linked to existing data
5. evaluate and communicate metrics, and
6. continuous improvement.

For more information, click here.

Tags: best practices, cost center, measurement tool, value of safety