The value of home safety for businesses

Home safety campaigns may not just save employers on sickness absence, they can also strengthen workplace safety culture, as Louis Wustemann explains.

The hierarchy of the most serious hazards people face outside work changes over time. Research by historians Professor Steven Gunn and Dr Tomasz Gromelski into coroners’ verdicts revealed that the most common cause of accidental death in Britain back in the 1600s was drowning in waterways, accounting for 40 per death of notified deaths. Lack of plumbing in field workers’ homes meant their only chance of a bath was to jump into a river or pond at the end of the day after sweating in the fields; but few knew how to swim.

Fast-forward to the present day and drownings are still a common cause of fatal accidents but they have fallen well behind other causes, such as falls - responsible for 61 per cent of non-work deaths in 2022/23 and an especially common cause of death among elderly people. Poisoning is the second most frequent cause of accidental death, followed by traffic accidents. That last category has been on a virtuous downward trajectory since the start of the century; fatalities and serious injuries from road accidents fell 9 per cent over the 10 years to 2022/23, a slower decline than the decade before, but a decrease, nevertheless.

But the long-term fall in road fatalities bucks an alarming trend overall in non-work accidents, highlighted last year in RoSPA’s report Safer Lives, Stronger Nation. The report revealed the rate of accidental deaths per 100,000 people jumped by more than 40 per cent in the decade from 2013 to 2022. Fatalities in some categories, such as poisonings and falls, almost doubled during that period.

What are the knock-on effects?

Many occupational safety and health professionals may think they have enough on their hands just trying to keep people from being hurt during their working hours, but this rising total of people killed and many thousands more injured when they’re away from their workplaces affects the productivity and profitability of the organisations they work for. In 2022/23, 7.7 million working days were lost because people had suffered accidents that prevented them going to work or had to take time off to care for someone else who had been hurt. RoSPA’s report estimates the annual cost to UK business at £5.9 billion.

There have long been organisations which recognised this toll of non-workplace accidents and tried to do something about it. Back in the 1990s, the occupational health department of London’s Metropolitan Police issued a series of leaflets for officers and staff with safety tips for domestic tasks such as putting up shelves. The force had calculated it was paying for more sickness absence attributable to DIY accidents than to work-related injuries.

There is also a case for supporting employees and their families outside the workplace that goes beyond the direct costs of not doing so. Indonesian shoe manufacturer Adis Dimension Footwear Balaraja Tangerang’s home health and safety provision focuses on antenatal and post-natal support for the 5,000 women it employs.

The company offers prenatal classes for expectant mothers giving useful information on infant health and pays for midwives and extra nutrition for employees’ babies and toddlers. The programme won Adis Dimension Footwear the RoSPA Awards 2025 Health and Safety Beyond the Workplace Trophy, sponsored by L’Oréal.

“As a labour-intensive company, it is our responsibility to respect and meet the needs of our employees – one of which is ensuring the health and wellbeing of, not only the workers themselves, but also their children and families,” says Rizky Zulhilda, the firm’s Senior Manager of Health, Safety and Energy Carbon. Rizky noted that the emphasis on looking after employees’ health outside the workplace builds loyalty among the workforce and makes the organisation more resilient.

Building a safety culture

The new approach of going beyond basic legal compliance and making safety and health a positive organisational value rests on the creation of a strong safety culture. A virtuous culture is usually defined as one in which employees believe the organisation cares enough about them and their colleagues to feel confident speaking up or stepping in when they see unsafe conditions or behaviour. This “culture of care” may be key to unlocking access to the higher levels of the safety culture models, in which employees no longer depend on safety experts to protect them but share the responsibility for protecting themselves and their co-workers.

Since 2016, L’Oréal’s Safe@Work-Safe@Home home accident prevention scheme. in partnership with RoSPA, has been rolled out to the company’s employees in more than 80 countries. Alongside videos and other material on preventing home accidents, outreach campaigns have seen visits to schools by employees in China, France and the US to teach pupils safety basics. Most recently, an offshoot of the programme, Keeping Kids Safe has brought safety education to hundreds of children in Brazil, India, Indonesia and South African townships.

The Safe@Work-Safe@Home programme is particularly useful in growing safety understanding among L’Oréal staff in less hazardous workplaces such as offices who may not have the same familiarity with risk. However, the company’s Global Vice President, Health and Safety, Malcolm Staves, believes the personal nature of the advice on protecting themselves and family members increases safety consciousness among all employees and that transfers back into the workplace. “By making safety personal and extending beyond the walls of L’Oréal, it deepens our safety culture, our sense of purpose and benefits everybody,” he says.

Providing employees with home safety advice, whether it is short training sessions, printed material or guidance on the organisation’s intranet, need not be a labour-intensive project. RoSPA’s Home Safety hub carries free-to-copy information on topics ranging from barbecue safety to storing toxic cleaning products so children cannot get at them.

Spreading safety education beyond the organisation’s premises doesn’t just make good moral and business sense. It could also boost safety performance within the workplace itself.

Find out more about partnering with RoSPA to create a safer, healthier and more sustainable future. www.rospa.com/about-us/working-with-rospa