Workplace Health and Safety (H&S), at its heart, aims to get every one of us back home to our families at the end of each day. Above all, this means preventing incidents. Sometimes, that means learning from them so as to prevent repeats and to eliminate residual workplace risks—so as to avoid an even worse outcome from happening the next time.
Here are eight proactive approaches I’ve come across all over the world as an HSE Manager. Each of these has helped to save life and limb, and drive improved H&S performance.
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Start at the Top
Effective Health and Safety starts with the boss. Without their visible support, the odds of effective integration within the business and delivering on the HSE strategy are less than even. In part, this is down to the principle of “what interests my boss fascinates me”, and how people react to what management shows interest in.
This means getting senior management. Help them to be able to talk about H&S—help them to help you. The more everyone onsite hears the “big boss” consistently talking about Health and Safety, the more seriously they’ll take it.
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Personal Performance Objectives
Visible top management support by itself isn’t enough. Any manager can stand up in the canteen, say a few words of encouragement and then set up a calendar reminder to do so again in a year’s time. This does not constitute genuine leadership—or support. What’s also needed is for top management to have personal, measurable Health and Safety performance objectives.
You want H&S to succeed, so don’t place unreasonable and additional pressures on your leader. Make it easy for your boss to embrace this approach, especially if this is new to them. Start with an objective that’s readily achievable or, better yet, one which they’re already doing but aren’t being appraised on.
One example might be for the boss to give 4 shop floor “dialogues” (see Section 5) per month. The dialogue targets for managers should be proportionately higher—after all, it’s they who ultimately own Health and Safety in their functions, teams and areas.
Positive incident reporting targets (see Section 7) for area managers also works. Encouraging reporting helps expose the every-day incidents that people think aren’t important, but which help to prevent serious injuries—if they’re learned from. Negative reporting (“target zero”), on the other hand, can drive poor behaviours; when one’s bonus is at stake, it’s easy to have “zero” incidents.
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Change your Reporting Line
If you are the site H&S Lead and your workplace has notable safety risks but you’re not on the management committee and you’re not reporting directly to the “big boss”, then Health and Safety isn’t a business priority.
The risks? You might struggle to raise H&S’ profile with management and thus improve performance. Why? Because if your boss isn’t the boss, then they have a split HSE-plus-other role. No matter how well they can multitask, your boss spends time wearing a “hat” other than H&S—and that’s a gap in effective H&S management.
Reporting directly to the chief mandates direct face time with them. This is crucial to maximising Health and Safety’s odds of success. Why? Because it empowers you to take serious matters straight to the one person who really counts onsite and who can get things done just by saying it.
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Management Team
If you report to the site lead then, odds are, you’re already part of the management team and you’ll know the difference this makes. If not, then no matter how seriously H&S is viewed onsite, your efforts could be even easier.
Sitting in on management meetings amplifies your voice. Critically, it makes you the peer of every other senior manager. Why is this important? Because it means that H&S-related communication always comes down the organisation’s hierarchy. If it has to first go “up”, to management level, the message can easily be diluted or even lost.
Being on this committee gives you the authority to raise HSE matters directly with the managers of all the teams, functions and areas onsite—which is where most H&S issues are likely to occur. This, in turn, allows your colleagues to more effectively attend to their legal H&S responsibilities.
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H&S Dialogues
H&S (and Environment) dialogues are brief, documented conversations that arise from positive or poor behaviours. Positive H&S behaviours are recognised and promoted, while poor ones are altered or eliminated.
Dialogues help catch unreported “near misses”—unsafe acts or conditions with the potential to result in injury but didn’t. An example is someone about to step onto a pedestrian crossing whilst distracted by their phone, and narrowly being hit by a passing bus. Learning from near misses helps prevent future injuries or death.
For dialogues to be successful: the recipient must remain anonymous; pre-printed dialogue cards with minimal but essential sections such as what, where, and when are best; finally, the “giver” should be the one to upload them into a user-friendly system accessible by all employees.
Offer the non-manager with the most dialogues a small but attractive monthly award. If you think this isn’t worth a 100 buck restaurant voucher, then you’re undervaluing preventative HSE. Why exclude managers from this? Because that’s their job even if H&S isn’t in their title.
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‘Stop Work’ Authority
In some ways, this is similar to dialogues except that it can be used whether or not an incident seems imminent. The system provides everyone onsite with the authority to step in and immediately halt any operation.
What’s the rationale? Besides intending to save life and limb, organisations that do this realise there are business costs to HSE and that these can exceed a brief production interruption. It is a very powerful behavioural tool demonstrating that the company values its peoples’ safety more than profits.
Empowering employees in this manner embeds H&S ownership, not just for individuals’ own safety or health, but also in helping to keep others from harm.
After the ‘Stop Work’ situation has been clarified or rectified, the operation continues safely. Organisational learnings come from documenting the ‘Stop Work’, the situation, and corrective actions taken.
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Positive Reporting Targets
Firstly, end “target zero” reporting—especially if linked to personal bonuses or involving site celebrations. Low incident rates are certainly to be applauded and communicated, but let’s not put up an entrance banner and have a party; inevitably, it’ll come back to haunt the company in some way.
While it’s true that all incidents are preventable, it’s also true that not all incidents will be prevented. If you agree with this, then it will be obvious why “target zero” schemes are bound to fail. Were there really no incidents, or just no reported incidents? I argue the latter every time.
Businesses should want all incidents to be reported. Why? Because the vast majority have extremely minor outcomes but, every now and then, the same situation will take someone’s limb or life. We must learn from the band-aid incidents to be able to make the necessary business changes to prevent the loss-of-life-or-limb incidents.
Implementing challenging positive reporting targets—including personal performance objectives—at all levels of the business supports the goal of H&S. It encourages every single incident or near miss to be reported so these can be used to make the workplace safer.
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Hazard Hunts
Familiarity breeds complacency. In my youth, I worked at a climbing wall holding the safety line for other climbers and periodically tightening the climb holds. One day, having done the latter several metres up, I was about to let go and abseil to the ground when I suddenly realised I wasn’t “hooked in”. I’d forgotten to attach a climbing rope—my lifeline—because I was distracted.
H&S incidents tend to involve highly trained, skilled or competent people. It tends to be the electricians who are electrocuted, and the machine technicians and operators who lose bits of their fingers or hands in the course of their work. Why? Because only certain employees are authorised to do their activities—and because unanticipated events happen, which is why preventable H&S incidents occur at even the best site.
One way to break this cycle, and to avoid the potentially dangerous outcomes of workplace H&S complacency, is to look at things with fresh eyes. Hazard hunts help do this, especially when non-manager colleagues undertake informal (but documented) H&S surveys looking for safety gaps in their colleagues’ workplaces.
Conclusion
A number of means exist to improve workplace Health and Safety, but the goal is always to eliminate risks or reduce them to acceptable levels to make the workplace safer. Usually, engineered controls—physical barriers or devices separating people from hazards—are most effective. However, such measures aren’t always possible.
Each of the eight strategies above are proactive organisational measures intended to embed and improve safe behaviours. They are additional to the technical and other controls required onsite. However, implementing these approaches costs the organisation very little if anything beyond fixed operational costs.
Done properly, they can have significant H&S performance benefits—and that means saving life and limb, and helping colleagues get back to their families at the end of each day.
Do you have proactive H&S strategies you’d like to share?
Photo credits: tomertu; Daxiao Productions; Yuttana Studio; olly; oatawa; agnormark; via fotolia.com.
© Nick Hart (2017) All rights reserved. #hsestrategy
