"Why not deliver information to senior management regarding your safety performance and how it contributed to the success of the business?" a safety professional was asked. "Because," responded the safety professional, "They aren't interested." Unfortunately, this is the assumption many safety professionals make far too often.
So, what are business or organizational leaders interested in? Right away I bet readers answered finances: dollars, costs, money. And appealing to finances is all we need to do to be successful in selling our safety initiatives, right? Well, not necessarily. Many safety professionals have completed studies and research showing how preventing losses reduces cost or contributes to operational efficiency, only to have their ideas shot down. So, how can we increase our success rate?
To know how we as safety practitioners can increase our success rate, we need to understand how organizations work. Organizations, not just "for-profit" businesses, have fundamental elements that make them work: finance, management, operations, and marketing. How these elements balance and work together is what leads to success. And, for us to be successful as safety professionals, we need to understand each of these elements and how they work together.
Ask anyone to define "finance" or type the word "finance" into any search engine on the internet, and you'll get a myriad of responses: stock quotes, personal finances, accounting, economics and mathematics, to name a few. As an operation within an organization, finance studies and addresses the ways in which businesses and organizations raise, allocate and use monetary resources over time, taking into account the risks entailed in their projects. Finance is the task of providing funds for the organization's activities (financial management) or investment (fund management). Safety is typically viewed as a financial management task, involving the balancing of risk and profitability. However, when we use finance to sell our initiative, we appeal to fund management. Fund management involves:
Identifying relevant objectives and constraints, such as goals, risk aversion or tax considerations;
Identifying the appropriate strategy, such as actively doing something as opposed to doing nothing; and
Measuring performance, such as gains and losses.
Management can be defined as the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization through the deployment and manipulation of resources. Manipulation here is not used as a derogatory term; rather, it defines how resources are utilized to achieve the best performance possible for the organization. The resources we are talking about include human, intellectual, intangible, material and financial. The early twentieth-century management writer, Mary Parker Follet, defined management as "the art of getting things done through people."
Operations, commonly known as "production" or "services," refers to those functions involved in running the organization for the purpose of producing value. Value refers to the outcome of operations from the assets owned by the organization.
