One of the many challenges faced by Safety Professionals is the need to engage senior
leaders or management at your companies and ensure that they are taking a proactive
approach to Workplace Safety. While you likely possess the expertise to monitor and
enhance your company’s Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) performance and
understand its importance, convincing other leaders without an EHS background of the
same thing requires a different skillset. Gaining the support of senior executives within your
company is often the differentiating factor in the success of your EHS programs, therefore it
is crucial that you are able to effectively articulate the benefits their business will bear from
investing in safety. You need to be able to ‘sell’ safety investment to people with different
priorities to your own.

The first and arguably most important step in doing so is ensuring you are aligned with the
larger goals of your company. Begin your proposal to leadership by clearly identifying one of
their pain points and demonstrating your understanding of the issues they face before
explaining how EHS investment can solve it. Whether it’s reducing avoidable costs or
maximizing productivity, they need to know that investing in safety will address these
concerns. This approach shifts the dynamic of the proposal from merely asking for more
investment in your programs to offering a solution to their problems. Because of this, you
will be heard by more open minds, increasing your chances of securing funding for your
programs.

With that being said, it is important to show, rather than tell, what investment in safety
programs will do for the business; senior executives want to see evidence. Your proposal
should include excerpts from academic articles, case studies, and safety success stories
immediately after discussing any benefits. For example, in ‘Financing Constraints and
Workplace Safety’, the authors present evidence showing that both positive cash flow
shocks and lower workplace injury rates positively impact firm value. (Cohn & Wardlaw,
2016)

Effectively tailoring your proposal to the broader goals of the company, presenting
evidence-based solutions, and clearly demonstrating their benefits will help you ‘Sell
Safety’ to your leadership and improve your chances at acquiring their support. We
encourage you to leverage these insights and strategies to advocate for greater investment
in workplace safety within your organization.