Chapter 5
Directing the decision-making process
Even presented in its most accessible form, apart from the most basic compliance figures required by leaders, any data communicated should be backed up by a conclusion or a request.
“You have to set up your stats to direct them to the things you need them to do,” says Louise Ward.
“Too many safety practitioners present pages of data and expect the leadership team to know what to do about them. If it was a P&L [profit and loss] report they would, so they tend to read it like a P&L report and say ‘this is too high or too low; fix it’.”
Practitioners should present whatever data they believe require senior management action. One example is root cause analysis of incidents. Imagine that an analysis shows that staff shortages or other business priorities are resulting in a pattern of accidents and near-misses, This analysis should be brought to the attention of the senior managers who can help reassert safety as a priority or fix the underlying causes.
Ward says this direction of leaders’ attention to areas where they can help solve a problem is much more productive than just giving them evidence of problems:
“If you can push them towards something where they can get a definite benefit by taking action, they get much more engaged,” she says.
Alastair Davey agrees and adds that where data is presented because the safety specialist believes it needs action from leaders, this should not be left implicit:
“When I wanted them to decide on an action I would even put ‘Decision required’ at the top of a slide in big red letters,” he says.
He also argues that: “One thing we miss in safety is communicating good news,”
Highlighting positive trends is important, especially if the safety professional has tried to analyze the reasons for any improvement and to find ways it could be replicated.
“We should try to learn from what goes well as much as what goes wrong and communicate that,” Davey says.
That said, the purpose of any board paper or report is not to encourage complacency but to communicate some of the healthy state of “chronic unease” about the potential for accidents that allows health and safety practitioners to push for improvements.
Presenting in Person
When health and safety professionals have to make presentations directly to an executive board, management committee or other group of senior managers, they must have a clear picture of the purpose of the presentation and let that purpose dictate its content and structure, as with any written submission.
“What’s the story you want to tell and what do you want to walk away with at the end of it?” asks Alastair Davey.
“You need to think ‘I want to have told them X, I want them to give me funding for Y.’ If they are presented with just a bunch of cluttered slides they will be asking ‘What are you trying to say here?’”
Shaping the information to ensure these messages and requests are clear requires thorough preparation. This preparation includes research into any patterns in the data that will require explanation, anticipating senior leaders’ questions, and refining the information to put in front of them so it does not include confusing or unnecessary details.
“I would spend an inordinate amount of time preparing,” says Davey, “eight hours or longer for a 20-minute presentation.”
Ensuring that the presentation is not derailed by over-long discussion on a single point is important, but may be hard when the safety professional is outnumbered and outranked by their audience.
“It’s hard when you are one person facing 10 or 12… I would lay out the agenda to the minute: 5 minutes introduction, 10 minutes current safety results and so on. And if the discussion drifted I would say ‘we are over time on this agenda point’ to keep them focused.” says Davey.
Action points agreed during the presentation should be recorded and distributed to those present afterwards.
Shaping the information to ensure these messages and requests are clear requires thorough preparation.
