A good working environment feeds through to the bottom line. It's been said before but now, thanks to a new tool which is available free of charge from the Danish Working Environment Council, companies can verify it for themselves, and make some fairly accurate calculations at that. This tool comes in the form of software which can be downloaded from the internet.
Occupational Health and Safety Management Accounting is a method of identifying costs and benefits relating to the working environment. Some 80 per cent of these costs and benefits are normally hidden in a company's financial system because they are bound up with other costs.
Major savings
The new tool can indicate with considerable precision what specific conditions in the working environment - e.g. a bad psychological environment - cost an employer, what major savings can be made by improving such conditions and how quickly investing in a better working environment can pay for itself. The tool is ideal for both public and private organisations.
COWI has been involved in developing this tool, which project manager Per Tybjerg Aldrich believes can give companies that "Eureka!" moment:
Better places to work
"I believe there will be plenty who'll come on board when they discover the financial benefits to be had from a better working environment. This means we can tackle a lot of the working environment ground which is not statutory and may therefore not have been covered before. In other words, what we might get out of it are better places to work in," says Per Tybjerg Aldrich.
In December 2006, just two months after being made available, the thousandth download of the program had been notched up.By Eva Isager, jaje@cowi.com Published: 26.04.2007
The Occupational Health and Safety Management Accounting tool was developed for the Working Environment Council by COWI in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers and seven private and public companies. Comprising a spreadsheet in MS Office Excel and manual, the tool is precise, operational and readily adaptable to the needs of any company by anyone with good knowledge of Excel.