What exactly is Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) organisational maturity? For me, it’s about HSE being effective—how well the organisation prevents or reacts to HSE risks, challenges, incidents and opportunities. Too simple, you say? You’d be surprised how hard it is to achieve this consistently.
For others, including the HSE Maturity Model, maturity is something else. It’s more about leadership.
Various versions of the management consulting model exist. All are self-assessment tools (“paper mirrors”) that chart how advanced HSE is within a given business, and the HSE gaps the organisation must close if it’s to progress to the next level. Maturity is synonymous with proactivity and leadership, whilst immaturity is beset by conflict and reactive mind-sets.
I disagree with these definitions—and the model in general. Besides being an oversimplified checklist approach to HSE progression, it misses adding real, strategic value to HSE and the business.
Why Should Businesses Care?
HSE is important, and organisations aim for effective HSE, because doing so protects them, their people, and the environment. That’s good for business continuity, employees, and the bottom line.
Contrary to the model’s version of success, effective HSE is the target; anything beyond this is a business decision. And firms do see a return on their investment into HSE excellence or leadership. By definition, that makes them leaders. It doesn’t make other businesses’ HSE less mature.
It takes time to build an HSE strategy and longer still to achieve it. Using a questionable model to assess progress or adjust course is reactive—all that time, effort and money has already been spent.
What’s needed is a model that helps businesses and HSE managers identify their goals at the very beginning, and then to build the HSE strategy around this.
The Maturity Model
Whatever the version, the model inevitably shows some form of progression, be it an arrow, sigmoid (∫), or steps. There are three variables: current HSE performance, target HSE performance (i.e. “maturity”), and the gap between these.
Businesses supposedly progress from immaturity (“conflict with HSE”) to developing (“HSE early successes”) to maturity (“HSE leadership”) based on some horizontal axis variable. This can be time, company growth or cumulative HSE learnings; from experience, it also means higher HSE budgets (i.e. cost-to-company). But not all small-medium enterprises have the resources for this.
The model is a clear, simple way of illustrating and communicating HSE’s progression over time.
So What’s the Problem?
The model, as outlined above, seems reasonable. And anything that advances HSE within the business has some value. I’ve used it for training, communication and self-assessment—no more!
Let’s take a look at why I believe the model falls short…
The HSE Maturity Model: Terminology
If businesses or HSE managers still use the model to assess performance and direction, then how it defines “failure” (immaturity) or “success” (maturity) matters. Why? Because we wouldn’t want to make strategic decisions using a miscalibrated ruler.
“Maturity”
Various models associate HSE maturity with terms such as: continually improving, proactive, compliance, accountable, cooperation, teamwork, behaviours, leadership, excellence, integrated, interdependent, resilient.
Is leadership the same thing as maturity? Surely we can’t all be leaders? Isn’t maturity about getting the job done well? Instead the model depicts “maturity” as only proactive—but all businesses, even leading ones, suffer incidents to which they must react. How they react reveals their HSE maturity. As for “compliance”, a legal requirement, this is step one even for “immature” companies.
I could go on, but the point is that most organisations should target effective HSE. Leadership HSE is another matter entirely.
“Immaturity”
Here, associations include: ad hoc, reactive, technology-dependent, systems-oriented, managing, involving, planned, supervision, poor behaviours. As before, many of these terms are misplaced, or common to all levels of HSE maturity.
The danger of poor terminology is that immature HSE might over-rate itself, and that places the enterprise, its people, and the environment at risk.
The HSE Maturity Model: A Deeper Look
There are even more fundamental issues with the model that concern me.
Checklist Approach
Because the model defines generic success, it encourages a checklist mentality, prioritising and focusing on paper gaps that might not match business reality. The ironies: any checklist approach to HSE management will have its own gaps, and is indicative of an immature HSE system.
Main Audience
Excluding management consultants, HSE managers and top management are the main audience.
Here’s what I think savvy top management might ask when presented with the model: “HSE is still developing?” “How much more will ‘mature’ HSE cost?” “Can’t HSE just focus on reducing incidents and contributing to business continuity?” “Do I need a new HSE manager who can?”.
None of these are questions we want our boss to dwell on. My point: does the model hurt or help HSE by raising more (and uncomfortable) questions than it answers?
Target Endpoint
Apart from poor terminology, the target for HSE progression is also misstated. In part, this is due to the model’s confusion between continual improvement and continual progression. Continual improvement—or learning—is ongoing regardless of HSE maturity. This is because all businesses and their HSE risks evolve over time.
Continual progression is about how far HSE integrates with (or governs) the business’ mentality. Without limiting HSE as a priority, economic realities for many businesses put finite constraints on the extent of progression, for example to “leadership HSE”. That doesn’t equate with ineffective HSE.
What’s needed is a “SMART” strategy and target endpoint for HSE, not a model encouraging meaningless rightward progression on a chart.
Progression Fallacy
HSE at one site is complex. It gains and retreats in fits and starts along many different fronts over time due to many factors. At the multinational corporate level, with many sites across different regions, this effect is multiplied.
If simple, linear HSE progression is a fallacy, then how can organisations meaningfully measure their position using a one-size-fits-all checklist model? And if a model isn’t measurable, what use is it?
So What’s the Solution Then?
Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is, as Teddy Roosevelt once noted, whining. That might be a little harsh to apply to all complaints, but it's probably apt in this case. As for my proposed solution, you can read more about “HSE Types” here.
Photo credits: Marek; Kenishirotie via fotolia.com.
© Nick Hart (2017) All rights reserved.
