For many of us, health and safety are two words that have just gone together. We don’t talk about workplace health without talking about safety, and vice versa.

But for some of our bosses or supervisors who may not be as versed in the language of workplace safety, it can be hard for them to make the connection with the importance of safety meaning so much in terms of health of the workforce.

Until, that is, the company takes a look at its health insurance claims and premiums, and starts panicking about how to afford the increases – and then they see why the premiums are up. They they will start to investigate. And then reality will hit.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Kullez via a Creative Commons license] You might not go jogging if you didn't have shoes, but would you if you had them, or found out you had them when you didn't think you did? Beleif and relality can be two different thigns, and this aplies to workplace welness programs, according to a couple fo recent surveys.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Kullez via a Creative Commons license]Shoes can be a perfect analogy for the integration of health and safety. But oftentimes it can be hard to implement in a workplace, so Todd Hohn has the task of helping companies do just that using a dramatic paradigm shift.

For Todd Hohn, the goal is to get through to these companies and their executives about health and safety in harmony before they see the bottom line result of a lack of integration.

Who is Todd Hohn?

I am really glad you asked. Todd Hohn was the subject of a Q&A published in the January 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine. He is the executive director of the Integrated Health & Safety Institute. Hohn’s job is to provide advocacy and outreach for the institute, finding partnerships with various stakeholders about the importance, necessity and tools to integrate health and safety into workplaces so everyone can work in a safe environment.

While many of us have been in this industry for a long time, we have to understand the reality that there are those out there who don’t really understand integration of health and safety in the workplace. This is where the institute comes in, as a sort of support apparatus for us safety professionals to help educate, inform and create change in the workplace surrounding occupational heath and safety issues. Hohn said that the institute  is designed to “accelerate” the process of integration and to encourage and facilitate research along this line in order to help organizations do a better job, faster, in recognizing the synergy between the two.

How to Integrate Health and Safety?

Hohn was asked this question, and his answer explained a bit about the background for the institute and where it is looking to go.

The first part of his answer had to do with the “why” of integrating health and safety. As some organizations and/or leaders of said organizations tend to be ignorant or simply not aware of health and safety integration, they will likely want to understand “why” they should consider this for their organizational workplace.  And while specific reasons may vary widely according to the industry, region and workforce, the general “why” has to do with understanding under the surface the importance of such integration and doing it within various workforce demographics and industries.

Next, Hohn said, came the “how” of doing this kind of integration. The institute was formed out of a summit of more than 20 top-tier OSH professionals, and one of the areas they worked on was that some of the measureables that companies have used in the past just were not adequate enough to really tell the story of a company’s safety performance.

So what did happen? The summit brought out 15 new indicators that align with the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in terms of showing how a company performs in health and safety issues in the workplace. It is with this tableau that the institute exists. It is now with the charge of teaching, educating and inspiriting a new paradigm in health and safety and to provide resources for companies to eventually implement these key performance indicators (KPIs) so they can more accurately dislay their safety performance among peer companies, competitors and across industries.

Why is Integration Hard?

Hohn got to the root of the matter, which is something that has been discussed on this blog several times before: The two most important aspects are communication and commitment. Part of the communication problem is not so much the message but how it is sent – this refers to the audience. Hohn noted that in the health-and-safety summit that was held, the big issue about communicating the integration of health and safety stemmed from the language in which the audience could understand. Once we are successful at communication the message in an understandable way, we can more readily and easily achieve the commitment and buy-in we need from the C-suite all the way down the levels of the organization. In this specific case, the C-site didn’t understand the message that was being presented, so it needs to be up to us safety professionals to talk with them and engage ina C-suite kind of way so they will engage and learn to understand.

But the other big factor is acting. Hohn insists that without passionate action by safety officers, engagement in this initiative cannot and will not happen through other ways. He says part of this work is to engage safety officers and inspire them to be agents of change and to drive the innovation that will be necessary to complete this vital integration of health and safety.