Budget forecasting fluctuates year-to-year and even quarter-to-quarter. Your department may have previously received the requested finances, but that doesn’t mean it always will act on them. This is especially true if you’re skipping some of the crucial steps to building trust and showing impact within your company.
Dan Christensen is a global occupational safety leader and exposure scientist with more than 18 years of experience as an industrial hygienist. You can view his LinkedIn here.
I interviewed him for a better understanding of how safety leaders secure budgets for investing in the processes, people, and technology that best protect workers.
“Demonstrating how the previous budget was invested, what it’s produced, and the benefit to the company is of utmost importance to retaining or even increasing budget,” Christensen said.
Here are the steps to help you accomplish this.
Collaborate with Partners and Vendors
There’s a limitation to how much data and insights you can gather alone through your company and technology. That’s why working with partners and vendors in related fields is beneficial. They can share data you may not have otherwise accessed. They can also help provide documentation that supports your reasoning for receiving the resources. Third-party validation is valuable to leadership when making business decisions.
“In one role, I was responsible for evaluating and reducing the risk associated with our fleet drivers,” said Christensen. “We used wearable systems to measure each driver’s body vibration and eye movement. These are valuable data points to have, but it didn’t answer what could be causing those vibrations and eye movements.”
Christensen explained that the fleet management company they leased vehicles from had a system to monitor the source of vibration – such as if the vehicle was on paved or unpaved terrain. Normally, those data points between the driver and the vehicle are not correlated, but the partners brought their data together to gain a more complete picture. This provided a better view of risk.
Procure Technology That Correlates Data and Provides Insights
Most companies that use wearables and sensors don’t have a problem with obtaining data. The problem is with organizing, making sense of, and sharing that data from multiple sources in a comprehensive way to evaluate risk, what’s causing it and what can reduce it.
That’s why VigiLife’s SafeGuard software does this for you. It works with wearables and sensors from different manufacturers, including commercialized technology like the Apple watch, to provide real-time monitoring and risk prevention of your team members.
You can see how it works here.
Build A Story
It’s important for everyone from executive leadership, operations, managers, engineers, HR and the workers themselves to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. This starts with story – the universal language for making complex or unknown information memorable and easy to understand.
“Many health and safety people share a graph and assume that everyone understands what that graph means,” Christensen said. “Without any context or a good story, you lose people in the data.”
Communicate Consistently
Don’t wait for when it’s time to request a budget to share your story and data. Provide regular communication that shows your data in ways that are commonly accepted. Share with all invested parties from managers to financial decision makers. This way people in different roles and departments can all vouch for your efforts.
For example, Christensen created a clickable graphic and sent it to operations managers responsible for different regions so they could easily stay updated on worker safety assessments.
“It should never get to the point where people are wondering what safety and risk mitigation benefits the company is gaining from your department’s efforts,” Christensen said. “That means the story hasn’t been told.”
Make Your Case
Make your proposal thorough but brief. Focus on the outcomes company leaders should expect given what the data suggests and what new innovations are available.
“The data itself is not valuable to the company unless you can show specific outcomes,” Christensen explains. “You need to show what you’ve measured, how your investments are helping you gain that data, what you’ve determined your risk level is, and how a continued budget can help improve workplace safety.”
Next Steps
Protecting workers is a combination of scientific assessment, oversight, process, and workers’ personal adherence to safety procedures.
But humans make mistakes and accidents happen. That’s where technology can help fill in the gaps from humans’ natural limitations.
SafeGuard makes it easy to show what you’re measuring, what the risk level is, and does so by providing continuous and real-time monitoring for your team. This is accomplished by ingesting data from the latest wearable sensors – including those from different manufacturers you may already be invested in or those your workers use personally. AI-powered analytics and military-grade cybersecurity are used to quickly correlate data and predict trends as well as meet the strictest security demands.
Read why the U.S. Air Force and other teams from athletes and police departments choose SafeGuard in our blog post 3 Different Use Cases for Predictive Personal Health and Safety Monitoring.