ROP, the return on investment in prevention. From theory to practice

No matter what anyone says, a company's first priority is to give itself the means to develop sustainably, and thus to make a profit. Under these conditions, employee health and safety is first and foremost a constraint which, to become part of this priority, must become a condition of company performance. Yet, in order to demonstrate this dimension of prevention, it was first necessary to break taboos and hypocrisies; in the motivations for prevention policies, beyond the regulatory aspect, studies show that economic stakes were placed fairly far behind immaterial notions (image, respect, ethics). What's more, economic considerations are only evoked in terms of costs: the costs of prevention, the costs of non-prevention.

We therefore need to move from a repair culture to a safety culture and, even better, to a safe operational culture, i.e. to fully integrate prevention into the operational approach, in order to achieve operational excellence. Awareness is growing, and more and more studies are being carried out on what is now known as the return on investment of prevention or "ROP" (Return on Prevention, by analogy with "ROI", Return on Investment). How is this done? What exactly are we talking about? How can it be applied at company level? What method should be used in specific cases? And what tools are available? The purpose of this article is to try and answer these questions.