One thing to start with – health and safety (H&S) is important for all businesses, irrespective of sector or where you are in the value chain. The risks you’ll focus on and how significant you view those risks will vary considerably, but all businesses need to have this topic as something to give attention to. There should be nothing you do in your business that is worth people getting hurt for.
If you are new to sustainability, how you approach this topic is likely to be different depending on the type and size of your organisation. In large manufacturers there will already be someone, maybe even a whole team of people, focused and responsible for health and safety. So, one aspect you’ll need to consider is how it fits into your sustainability communications and organisational structure. This isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. If you have a well-established H&S programme, particularly if it has an identity that has been built up over time, do you want to spend a lot of time and effort to rebadge it, or bring under an umbrella of sustainability? For most of your internal audience it is unlikely to add a great deal of value to do so. So many organisations in this position will create some linkage (particularly if one of their sustainability pillars is “our people” or something similar) but leave it to be managed as it currently is. However external communication may be different, with H&S very clearly part of an overall sustainability story that you share with relevant stakeholders. There is no right or wrong answer here, but it is worth spending some time thinking about both how you manage and direct H&S activity but also how you communicate performance internally and externally if you have a preexisting programme.
If you don’t have a separate team or if it needs a higher profile and reinvigorating, it can be brought into your overall approach to sustainability. And I go back to where I started here, it is relevant for all businesses. I used to work for a manufacturing organisation, but most of our safety incidents were “slips, trips and falls”, with as many if not more in the offices and labs as there were in the factories.
Somebody told me a long time ago that you can tell those people who have been in businesses that have a genuine safety culture by watching them go up the stairs. Those who have will hold the handrail. This might seem trivial, but it illustrates how by constant focus, you can change behaviours to be safer, and to become second nature. And this really is the essence of what you are trying to do in this area: create a culture that encourages and promotes a safer working environment leading.
Identifying what your key risks are is a key starting point and understanding your current injury rates will be an important feed into this. Once you know where you have issues and/or risks then you can decide where you will focus effort, and this may well have a different emphasis in different parts of the business. Training can then be delivered accordingly. Setting the tone in this is really important. This is not box ticking but caring for your people and encouraging them to look out for each other. The message from the top must be clear and consistent here too. Firstly, your senior managers need to be role models and care and talk about safety. Some very impactful programmes I’ve experienced are where senior managers talk about when they, or people close to them, have had accidents (not necessarily at work) and the effect it has had on them. The message from the top needs constant reinforcement, as the first time a senior manager sees something unsafe and doesn’t call it out, it can look like safety isn’t that important after all.
I remember years ago talking to my manager in his office when he was clearly distracted. I asked him what the matter was, and he pointed across the road to where an employee was outside another building with what looked like a gas cylinder and a lance. As we watched, it was clear he was going to use it to burn off weeds and was in the process of lighting it in what was clearly a dangerous way. My manager shot out of the room and dashed across the road, and I saw him talking to the guy who nodded and packed up his kit having clearly been told this wasn’t a good idea. A few minutes later my manager came back in, but rather than being pleased with himself as I expected, he was furious. “I don’t believe it!” he said, “I just saved that guy from doing something really dangerous but as I came back in someone told me off on the stairs for not holding the damn handrail!” To be fair, he then told this story around the business, raising the original issue and safety on stairs in a very memorable way for everyone!
You can help create this culture by putting some structure in place. Maybe start team meetings with a safety moment – asking a different team member to talk about something they saw or changed to get people to think about various aspects of safety. Do you put all your sales team or anyone that drives on company business through safe driving courses including refresher training? Do your visitors get a safety briefing when they visit your premises? Do you remind people in unfamiliar buildings for meetings where the fire exits are? You could also set up a “near miss” programme, encouraging people to spot hazards before they become incidents and take corrective action, recording what they did to share with others. If you adopt “near miss” reporting, target quantity initially to get it momentum – you can refine the quality later if you need to. It’s also worth being aware that some cultures may be reticent initially to report near misses. But it is a well proven approach to avoiding accidents in the workplace. And if accidents do occur, make sure they are investigated fully and shared with senior management, including any learning and changes required to avoid them in the future.
Whatever approach you take to managing safety then you’ll need to report your performance and the key metric is lost time accidents, which refers to any incident that results in keeping an employee away from work for any period of time. These can have slightly different names or definitions in different countries but are usually expressed as a number of accidents per specified number of hours worked. It’s worth investigating what the mandatory reporting requirements are if you don’t have H&S professionals in your business.
Although I’ve used the term “health and safety”, I’ve really just talked about safety so far. The health side of the agenda, often called wellbeing now, encompasses a much wider spectrum of activities. You could run a series of events, with outside organisations invited, to educate your teams on different topics such as mental health or healthy eating. You could offer subsidised or on-site exercise or relaxation classes or offer health checks to employees. There is a lot of scope in this area, and again different things will be appropriate in different companies, and in this area, HR usually has a great deal of involvement. Some things will be relevant to all employees, others more so for distinct groups – one of the most well received activities I’ve seen was the opportunity to have a weekly head massage for a customer service team. Simple and cheap to arrange, but for those doing such a stressful job, it went down a storm!
Done poorly, H&S can be seen as a negative drag on the business, but done well, it can keep people safe, improving engagement and overall business performance. And at the end of the day, it is about caring for the people in our organisations and making sure that when we say “nothing we do is worth getting hurt for” we mean it and act accordingly.
About the Author
Chris is a senior strategic leader with over 25 years’ commercial experience including sales, marketing, strategic planning and major business change initiatives at AkzoNobel and ICI. He has a wide knowledge of sustainability and how to integrate this into business having held senior sustainability roles at AkzoNobel for 12 years, including as Global Sustainability Director Decorative Paints and AkzoNobel Planet Possible Programme Manager. Chris is now an independent sustainability consultant and a pension trustee director.
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