More than $1.3 billion.
That’s the National Safety Council’s estimate of the costs associated with workplace injuries, illnesses and fatalities in 2024.
An effective safety and health program can help drive down both the human and monetary costs. However, safety professionals who work within a limited budget may be tempted to adopt the mindset of “the company isn’t willing to spend money, therefore we can’t be safe,” cautions Dick Flynt, a former senior safety consultant at NSC.
No matter the budget, Flynt said, safety pros can pull from low- to no-cost resources, lean on relationships with others and get creative.
“The first thing to understand is that there isn’t a direct correlation between budget and safety,” he added. “There’s low-hanging fruit we can grab without going out and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Kick things off
“Sometimes people just don’t know where to start,” said Brandy Zadoorian, CEO and principal consultant at Greenville, SC-based Triangle Safety Consulting, “especially if they come into a site and they maybe haven’t done it before or their site doesn’t have a budget.”
The first steps, she said, involve understanding your processes. “Are your people using chemicals? Are they using respirators?” Zadoorian said. “What written programs do we need and not need? It’s understanding what people are actually doing out on the floor.”
Involving workers should also be a high priority because they know the job tasks.
“They know what the hazards are and where they all are,” Flynt said. “If you make it safe for them to tell you, they’ll tell you where all the hazards are.”
Build the basics
As owner of Exceed Safety, headquartered in Raleigh, NC, Tim Neubauer has consulted with many clients who have budget shortcomings.
When it comes to building a safety and health program with little to no funding, he recommends OSHA’s “Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs” resource, which is free to download.
Zadoorian agrees that OSHA is a great place to get started.
“I love OSHA’s website,” she said. “If you don’t know something about a topic, they likely have a fact sheet or a white paper on it. You can totally create a PowerPoint based on that.”
Along with hundreds of fact sheets and other online resources from OSHA, the National Safety Council offers a bevy of free resources. In addition, other safety-focused organizations and agencies, including CPWR – The Center for Construction Research and Training, Electrical Safety Foundation International, National Fire Protection Association, and Chemical Safety Board, have resources available.
When Zadoorian conducts training on powered industrial trucks, for example, she gives workers an OSHA fact sheet on the subject as a takeaway.
Neubauer also has another key resource.
“I like to leverage vendor relationships,” he said. “If you use ladders, there are several ladder manufacturers that have awesome training material that’s free. If you buy a forklift, go to the manufacturer. Go to the vendor who sold it to you.”
Local and state agencies, along with insurance providers, also can help.
The North Carolina Department of Labor’s Charles H. Livengood Jr. Memorial Library, for example, offers residents of the state who are patrons free access to a streaming video service of safety and health content. Similar services are available in Michigan and Oregon.
Network
Budget restrictions aside, “networking is critical” for any safety pro, Neubauer said. “Safety people tend to share. We all live on limited budgets.”
For Zadoorian, professional associations and industry groups provide plenty of opportunities to develop meaningful relationships.
“I’m heavily involved in my local organization because I see those people constantly, and that helps build a better friendship,” she said.
Those connections allow her to lean on a friend, for example, to help her when she’s training workers on electrical safety topics.
Another option: NSC Divisions. These groups “connect NSC member employees with shared safety interests through education, resources and networking.” Members from all industries and at all experience levels are welcome. Go to nsc.org/divisions to see the list of industry groups. NSC members also can join the member community – at nsc.org/member-corner – to exchange ideas, ask questions and learn from peers.
Reduce hazards
If a certain solution is out of reach financially, Flynt encourages looking at the situation not as a stop sign, but as a detour.
“The biggest challenge is when you know there’s a really good solution that will completely eliminate the hazard but you can’t afford it and you can’t talk management into it,” he said.
He suggests discussing the matter with management for future budget planning and researching other solutions.
Next: “Always look for ways to address the risk. You can improve tremendously with small, incremental reductions in risk.”
At one manufacturing company, Flynt said, its workers manually loaded pallets by lifting 40-pound boxes for an entire shift.
“You could tell there was going to be an incident if they kept that up,” he said.
An automatic or robotic palletizer was considered too expensive by the company.
Instead, Flynt examined the process and identified several solutions. A pallet balancer – which raises the level ΩΩΩof a pallet – had a $1,500 price tag, less than 1% of the more costly solution.
Alternatively, “you can look at administrative controls,” he said. “You can get people to rotate out of that job – so many hours a day on, then so many hours off. You can look to see if it’s possible to ship the boxes in lighter weights.
“There’s a whole host of solutions between the way it is now and the ultimate solution. That’s where we live.”
