Why do businesses ignore the ‘health’ in health and safety?

Why do businesses ignore the ‘health’ in health and safety? By Gareth Jenkins, Managing Director of DS Smith’s UK Packaging Division

When I look back at 2016, I realise how spoiled we have been with a bumper year of sport. The sheer hard work, determination and dedication required by each athlete to succeed is extraordinary and the sense of pride, celebration and inspiration that this instils in observers is second to none. This made me think about the power of health and fitness and whether or not businesses should be doing more to harness this type of feeling through their own health and wellbeing programmes.

Most organisations have health and safety policies, and, as a manufacturing business, we take safety extremely seriously at DS Smith. We operate a programme called ‘Safe Systems of Work’ and since its introduction two years ago we have seen safety standards improve by 25% each year. However, in many organisations the reality is that the ‘safety’ dominates these policies, and initiatives relating to employee physical and mental health often fall by the wayside, but at what cost does this come to a business?

According to the Health and Safety Executive, 23.3 million working days were lost due to work-related ill health in 2014 – 15, the equivalent to each employee suffering from ill health taking 19 days off a year. This clearly has a negative effect on an individual’s quality of life, but it also has a wider impact on health services and the economy, with NHS England estimating that this costs employers and tax payers around £22 billion a year. Furthermore, research by the Department for Work and Pensions indicates that almost 50% of the UK workforce will be 50 or over by 2024. This, coupled with the removal of the fixed retirement age five years ago, points to the fact that the UK workforce is ageing and more people are suffering from long-term health problems. 

Positive impact of a healthier workforce

When you consider these factors, they can have a huge impact on an organisation’s bottom line and it is clear that a healthier workforce has a direct correlation with increased productivity and more engaged and committed employees. I have always believed strongly that a healthier workforce impacts the business in so many ways; individuals are more engaged, real change happens at pace, our customers see a difference in the quality of their products – so it’s more than worth the investment.

Many organisations won’t hesitate to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a new piece of equipment but when it comes to investing in staff – who really should be a company’s biggest asset – they fail to do so as things like health and fitness programmes are deemed to be fluffy ‘nice to haves’ and many senior managers need to be convinced of the benefits of introducing wellbeing initiatives. This is a short-term outlook that is not only damaging to existing staff members, but may also prevent your organisation from attracting the very best new recruits.

Supporting staff to introduce wellbeing schemes

According to research by the Corporate Leadership Council, emotional commitment has by far the greatest impact on peoples’ willingness to go the extra mile, rather than the more logical rational reasons. At DS Smith, one of our company values is to be caring and, while we have always been a caring organisation, it is only more recently that health and wellbeing have really come to the fore. For example, we’ve introduced a number of initiatives to try and encourage our staff to take a break from their work and to eat more healthily, including free fruit Fridays, making sure that there are healthy food choices in the canteens at our sites and introducing a policy where no one can eat lunch at their desk.