Build a business case for your audit

British Safety Council understands the challenges faced by those wanting to undertake an audit. You may understand the value and benefits, but senior colleagues need a compelling business case to quantify – or at least qualify – your company’s investment.

The most important thing to communicate is that an audit is not just a safety inspection, it is a consultative process that helps businesses establish best practice through continual improvement and certified excellence.

Don’t forget, if you have any questions or queries, you can call us direct on +44 (0)20 3510 8355.

Open your business case with your vision, ambition and mission. “I am requesting an audit to give the Board reassurance of compliance, reduce costs, implement best practice to drive continuous improvement and build [the company’s] reputation for excellence in our sector.” Consider relating this to your company’s own brand vision or mission statement.

Briefly explain what you are asking for:

“The audit process involves a 360-degree consultative approach that assesses performance before recommending tailored solutions for best practice. By working closely with leadership, auditors can help to implement improved or new processes and systems to drive improvements. Undertaking an audit also results in certified excellence.”

Personalise this statement if there are particular areas you and/or leadership are keen to address.

You have said what you want to achieve and what you are asking for to achieve it. Now you must break down the broad benefits into specifics by explaining what each of them means for your business. The key is to address the barriers to approval: budgets, staff buy-in, time and the ability to show demonstrable outcomes.

Select the benefits that are relevant to your business. You can cut and paste these sections into your business case.

While reputation cannot always be quantified, it is easier to show the pounds-and-pence impact of accidents and illness. The key to putting together a compelling business case, is to show how much your business has lost and/or could lose due to accident and illness, and compare it to the cost of an audit that will help reduce that figure. For example, it is estimated that for every £1 of insured losses, accidents and ill health cost business between £8 and £36 in uninsured losses. (This alone can be a shocking figure: just ask your HR team if there have been any insurance payouts in the past 10 years, and times that number by eight – that is the smallest amount that accident or illness cost your business).

Speak to your HR department to gather as many of these stats and figures and put them into the table below (after removing the examples). As well as the specific costs and expenses, you can work out the amount that absences and reduced productivity cost business using HSE figures.

Multiply each business cost by the number of instances for your company, before totalling the overall cost column. This is the cost to your business based on national averages. Include a sentence that says:

“Using HSE averages, we can calculate that the cost of accidents and illness to [the company] has been £[insert figure] over the last 12 months. An audit [costing £XXX] will assess areas for improvement and help to implement best practice that will result in considerable savings by reducing the number of accidents and absences.”

*These national average costs include: productivity costs (net lost income, taking into account of loss of output and earnings due to absence from work, and offsetting transfers from one party to another, e.g. benefits payments are a cost to Government, but an equal and opposite offsetting benefit to individuals); production costs, such as cost of recruitment and work reorganisation; the cost of Employer’s Liability Compulsory Insurance, less compensation pay-outs to individuals; health and rehabilitation costs, such as NHS costs; administrative and legal costs, such as costs of administering benefits claims.

**Collect the figures for the last 10 years and calculate a yearly average.

Audits can help reduce these and other costs by XXX%, which could mean your business could save £XXXX each year.

Many organisations offer health and safety audits, but British Safety Council are global leaders in health and safety, and our audits offer a higher order of expertise and ongoing value.

• We help organisations of all sizes and in all sectors develop and maintain effective policies and processes
• We work with our members to develop best practice
• We’ve been doing this for 60 years, educating millions of workers and making hundreds of thousands of workplaces safer
• We’re consulted directly on legislation and actively campaign to raise standards
• 60 years of supporting excellent health, safety and environmental management
• As part of its charitable work, British Safety Council leads health and safety networking forums for all sectors, and facilitates and promotes best practice in Britain and overseas
• As a not-for-profit organisation, we use all our resources to reduce risk and prevent injuries in the workplace, across the world.

Below is a list of important things to consider when creating your business case:

• Make enough time to fully develop your business case
• Keep it simple to ensure your point is clear and compelling
• Only highlight things relevant to your organisation.