There’s no getting around the expense of attending safety conferences. The price tag of sending you to a safety show can exceed over $3,000 in direct costs alone, not to mention the time and energy spent on the show that could be applied elsewhere. So it’s no surprise that your employer may be reluctant to pay your admission to the next national safety conference.

At the same time, you can discover ideas, products and training programs that can keep workers safer and save your company hundreds of thousands of dollars in injury-related expenses. Here are a few ways to help you make the case for attending a safety conference.

Know your audience

Step one in getting approval is to understand your audience. What’s important to your boss and company stakeholders? It’s likely production numbers, profit margins and other performance-related KPIs. What are their pain points or challenges in meeting those KPIs? There’s a good chance that safety-related issues (like key people missing work with a back injury) are standing in the way of a more productive workforce.

Relate your biggest safety challenges to your employer’s biggest business challenges. Show how injuries affect production and expenses. Solutions that reduce the frequency of incidents like slips and falls by even 10-20% would have huge benefits for an organization’s performance.  Demonstrate how the leading safety experts you’ll meet at the conference can contribute to finding that solution.

Plant the seed

Start early to give your employer time to consider your case. It will also allow you to book flights at a lower rate and register early to take advantage of conference discounts. It gives you more time to prepare for the safety conference too.

Get an early copy of the conference schedule so that you can point to the many relevant sessions you’ll attend and vendor booths you’ll visit. You can also say something like “It’s been a while since we’ve attended a conference and our back injuries are still affecting our workers and production on a weekly basis. Maybe we should consider going.”

Use a casual, collaborative tone. Be sure to follow it up with a more detailed case on the value of attending and reminders about early-bird discount deadlines.

Do the math

Numbers don’t lie, and one of the most compelling arguments you can make for attending a safety conference is to outline the potential long-term savings of better injury prevention. If you come away from the conference with a single idea that will help avoid just one serious injury, it could save your company $100,000 in direct and indirect costs.

Consider that the average cost of attending a safety conference is $1,000, and your company will likely spend another $2,500 on travel, food and accommodations. That’s a total of $3,500 in expenses—but by learning best practices that will save the company $100,000 in injury-related costs down the road, the end result is $96,000 in savings. That’s an ROI of 3,233%.

These calculations are based on OSHA’s $afety Pays calculator. Use it to run a few scenarios based on the most common injuries in your workplace. The size of potential savings will quickly become apparent—and it will be to your employer as well.

Other ways to justify attendance

Here are a number of other ideas to justify attending a safety conference:

• Conferences are a great way to get new safety ideas or preview upcoming products. If you report to a higher-level safety person, ask them if they have specific ideas or products that you could research on their behalf. If they are already planning on going to the conference then offer to go with them to cover more ground or add an additional perspective.
• Conferences provide the opportunity to ask consultants and thought leaders questions without the huge consulting fees they normally charge. You can also establish connections that you can turn to for support after the conference.
• If your company has multiple sites, the conference can be a good location to meet with your counterparts.
• You can gather resources, PowerPoint slides, stories and ideas to use in training and safety communications.
• Safety conferences allow you to evaluate speakers and consultants for in-house presentations, training or corporate safety days.
• A strong presence at safety shows demonstrates to employees that safety comes first and the company is committed to staying current on safety issues.
• Some conferences offer additional workshop sessions for various certifications that could help justify the expenses.

Final steps

You don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t expect to improve your company’s safety performance unless you see what other people are doing, what other products and solutions are available, and the best practices other EHS professionals rely on.

Once you’ve received the go-ahead to attend a conference, use this free safety conference guide to plan your conference trip, keep track of sessions you’d like to attend and make notes while you’re there. Download the conference guide and worksheets here.