to create structured methods to analyze your worksites in ways that enable
you to accurately assess potential risks and then develop the means to pre-
vent and control hazards.
In this chapter, we cover the basics of safety, including implementing a safety
plan, minimizing accidents, and educating employees. We also look at some
of the many benefits of improved safety, including lowered healthcare costs
and better employee recruitment and hiring.
Keeping Your Employees Safe and Healthy: The Big Picture .................
The ramifications of a health and safety plan are as extensive as they are
positive. When you take planned, verifiable measures to implement a health
and safety program that manages employee commitment and involvement,
worksite analysis, hazard prevention and control, and certified training for
all employees — from your ground-level workers right on up to your C-level
hotshots — you can create a virtually foolproof program for success.
Have a look at the potential benefits. In addition to increasing the morale and
productivity of your people, your business’s turnover will decrease even as
the quality of your product improves. Plus, you can almost certainly count on
enhanced labor and management relations, along with an overall improve-
ment in the use of your human resources.
Happy, healthy, whole employees translate to lower workers’ compensation
insurance costs, reduced medical expenditures, smaller expenditures for
return-to-work programs, and fewer faulty products. You spend less paying
for job accommodations for injured workers, and you also spend less for the
overtime benefits that are sure to accrue when your healthy people have to
step in for those who are not.
Both your employees themselves and their families benefit from your health
and safety program, too. Staying healthy guarantees that their incomes are
protected and their family lives are free of the discontent that would be sure
to result from the anxiety and stress brought on by injury or illness.
In short, caring for and protecting people in your workplace makes them feel
a part of the whole, a part of the world around them, so that when at last you
are ready to create a unified strategy committed to environmental responsi-
bility in every sector of the company’s ecosystem, your employees will waste
no time jumping on board the GRC wagon. The well-being of employees is
good for everyone and everything — our businesses, our fellow workers, our
families, our communities, and our economy.
174 Part III: Going Green
