Traditionally workplace safety and health issues have had little or no profile in the discourse around sustainability. However, once the safety-sustainability "connect" is raised within this context few people would agree that companies that consistently kill or maim their employees can be regarded as being sustainable.

Beyond this truism there are other aspects of a company's workplace safety and health record and performance that make this particular dimension of sustainability worthy of further investigation and development.

The great utility of workplace safety and health is its proxy for management competency. For those assessing the sustainability of a company, safety performance and policy can be used as a key indicator of a company's capacity to deal with other complex social issues such as product safety and the environment as well as its financial management.

The prime ingredient in achieving excellence in safety and health performance is the degree to which safety becomes entrenched at every level in the corporate culture. A culture that values the safety of its employees and does not claim that some level of injuries and death is "just the cost of doing business" is the template for a successful workplace safety and health program.

A culture that tolerates and accepts unsafe conditions speaks loud about a company's overall attitude. If a company cannot even protect those individuals closest to it - its workforce - what does it say about the safety of its products? If a corporation doesn't care about people then what does this say about its attitude to the environment? Unless the culture is right all the systems and processes in the world won't prevent accidents.

A corporate culture that strives to do everything in its power to protect its people is not only a template for a safe workplace. The "footprint" of a strong workplace safety culture can be logically extended into other aspects of a company's operations. For example a safe workplace means an emphasis on process safety. In the chemical industry this automatically leads to emission reduction. If the culture is right this will further translate into efforts to reduce waste and emissions so not as to impact the surrounding community.

Product safety and stewardship are also further logical extensions of safety along the sustainability continuum. Taken to its logical conclusion, a healthy, safe corporate culture can extend into the global commons. Full lifecycle analysis extends "safety" into the realms of global biodiversity and climate change as the safety culture is driven through the value chain and beyond into the value web that defines civil society more broadly.

Once the safety message becomes a corporate mantra it becomes difficult for the company to tolerate inconsistencies between safety in the workplace and, say, unsafe products or activities that may endanger ecological processes.

Thus a strong workplace safety and health culture can be a useful and practical template for operationalising sustainability. Safe companies mean safer communities and a safer planet.

Safety and health also is an attractive proposition because, unlike many other social dimensions of sustainability, it is measurable. There are established metrics that measure a company's safety performance that allow progress to be documented and comparisons to be made between companies. At the most basic level, poor safety and health practices cost a company money in the form of workers' compensation, down time, skill replacement costs and associated decrease in efficiency. In addition poor heath and safety practices expose companies to a range of risks including prosecution, litigation and brand damage. Other softer metrics include staff morale, turnover and productivity. Brand and corporate reputation are clearly affected by health and safety performance, making it even more attractive as an indicator of a company's ability to make profits while fulfilling its social responsibilities.

In summary, workplace safety and health is under-utilised as both a measure and a driver of sustainability. Ecos is developing the on-the-ground experience, the tools and the models that can assist companies to use a focus on safety to achieve their sustainability goals in innovative and effective ways.