Chapter 6
Health and safety inputs – where is your data coming from?
If senior managers are solely interested in accident statistics, practitioners need to educate them that these only provide a snapshot of what happened in the weeks or months previous. They are NOT a guarantee of future performance.
Low overall incident rates are no bulwark against major safety and health failures in future. There are many examples of organizations celebrating extended periods without an LTI (Lost Time Incident) who have suddenly had to manage a serious, even fatal, accident. It is even possible that long spells of low incident rates can lead to complacency and relaxed safety controls. New schools of safety management emphasize the need for organizations to concentrate not just on minimizing incidents and near-misses, but actively to foster a positive safety culture which creates the conditions in which risk is controlled day to day. This approach has been summarized by the academic Erik Hollnagel as Safety 2 and by safety consultant and author Dr Andrew Sharman as “making safety”, and it requires different reporting metrics, focusing on inputs into the safety system and active measures to develop a positive safety culture.
These measures, sometimes described as “leading indicators,” include:
✔ Audits – internal or external, with significant findings and resulting actions scheduled and closed out.
✔ Risk assessments reviewed and updated.
✔ Management tours completed – senior management or site management.
✔ Safety observations – trends in notification of risky and safe behavior observed by employees.
✔ Employee opinion polls – tracking responses of employees to statements such as “My manager ensures I can work safely” and “I believe my health and safety is important to the company.”
✔ Safety training statistics – numbers trained in organizational OSH campaigns or in specific hazard controls such as driving and confined spaces working.
A note on the last item:
Training is a vital element of any safety system – as well as a legal requirement – and though it qualifies as an input, the fact that it has been carried out is only partial evidence of its contribution to making a workplace safer. Post-training evaluation involving either the trainees or their supervisors, preferably weeks after the training has been delivered, to check levels of retention or behavior change, is a valuable measure of its likely effectiveness.
If the relevance of these input measures is not apparent to senior managers, safety professionals should explain their importance in providing the assurance that executives seek primarily from a safety and health function—that risk has been managed to an acceptably low level.
Louise Ward notes that these indicators are only relevant to leaders in organizations where the safety culture is sufficiently mature for them to be meaningful. Those at a more basic level are only going to be interested in accident rates. The input measures should be introduced as they become more engaged and the safety culture develops.
But Alastair Davey says that even when cultural development is at an early stage, it is important to balance injury and illness statistics with some information on safety inputs, such as progress in implementing new programs or initiatives.
Malcolm Staves, Global Vice President Health & Safety at L’Oréal, says that when the organizational maturity and leaders’ understanding of the issues is sufficiently advanced, safety practitioners no longer need to present their data in terms of simple health and safety management.
“I talk about enterprise risk management, talent management and extra-financial added value,” he says.
Couching information in these broader terms helps cement the position of health and safety as a business-enabling function rather than one concerned only with compliance.
“It helps professionals get credit for what they do in transforming the culture as well as being the risk assessment experts,” says Staves.
Health and Wellbeing Indicators
Many organizations are now growing beyond the basic approach to health and safety of meeting legally-required minimum standards and instead look to protect and nurture workers to maximize business efficiency and productivity. Health and safety practitioners can include an overview of progress in wellbeing programs by drawing on a range of indicators:
✔ Opinion survey evidence of employees’ general health and happiness
✔ Mental health indicators, including feedback from human resources staff and mental health first-aiders
✔ Take-up of company wellbeing initiatives, such as walking clubs and subsidized gym membership
✔ Data from employee health checks, including blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index
✔ EAP use; anonymized data from employee assistance programs
Some of these measures—EAP referrals and mental health first-aiders’ referrals—overlap with occupational health indicators as sources of data about work-related stress, anxiety and depression, one of the biggest causes of sickness absence.
Whether they are classified and reported as occupational health or wellbeing metrics depends on the organizational culture and priorities.
