Importance of health, safety & environment to your business

Improve your reputation through health, safety and environmental practices

Your reputation can be an important asset to your business. A good reputation helps you attract and retain customers. It makes it easier to recruit new employees and can improve employee motivation. It encourages suppliers to want to be associated with you.

Your approach to health, safety and the environment can be an important part of that reputation. Some businesses have built their success on a reputation for doing the right thing. Others have suffered as customers, local communities and even their own employees have turned against them.

It's well worth making customers, employees and the local community aware of your environmental commitment. For example, you might want to emphasise the steps you've taken to reduce air, water and noise pollution and to recycle more materials.

Your environmental performance is likely to be of interest to customers. They may be interested in how you minimise and dispose of waste, what you've done to make your processes cleaner and more energy and water-efficient and the environmental credentials of your raw materials.

See the page in this guide on how to introduce environmental cost-reductions.

Staff may gain added motivation from the fact they work for an environmentally responsible business. This may also be attractive to potential recruits. You can read about getting staff involved in environmental issues on the Envirowise website.

Involve employees in health, safety and environmental discussions. This isn't just a legal requirement, employees may have a better understanding of the risks and problems than you do.

And they'll also see that you value their opinions and are taking steps to protect their interests. See our guide on occupational health and welfare: an overview. You can also download the guide on consulting employees from the HSE website (PDF).

Get information on health and safety issues for businesses in Northern Ireland at the HSENI website or from the HSENI Enquiry Line on Tel 0800 0320 121.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• Compliance with health, safety and environmental rules
• Avoid the costs of illness, accidents and incidents at work
• Improve your reputation through health, safety and environmental practices
• Introduce environmental cost-reductions
• Health, safety and environmental practices and your insurance costs
• Plan ahead to get health, safety and the environment right

 Print This Page

Source - Business Link; Crown Copyright.