BUSINESSES ARE EMBRACING HEALTH AND SAFETY STRATEGIES

Health and safety professionals are adopting different strategies to ensure people are safe, and that includes a focus on developing talent. However, concerns remain about how effectively they measure performance.

With so many challenges and new issues to get to grips with, it’s perhaps not surprising that many respondents to the 2024 Health & Safety Report, produced by RS in association with Health and Safety Magazine, feel they have some way to go on the journey to becoming a truly mature function. Just 39 per cent put their business maturity level as high, compared to 54 per cent who opt for medium. Some seven per cent state this is currently at a low level.

Dr Karen McDonnell, Occupational Health and Safety Policy Adviser at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), describes health and safety as a continuum. “There is no end,” she says. “Getting health and safety right requires a daily focus on embedding ‘what works’ in organisations, irrespective of their size. It needs a consistent approach that’s underpinned by the discipline of pausing, reflecting and re-setting around key topics that ensure workers return home safe and healthy.”

Yet there can be a hesitancy to share how well an organisation is doing, she adds. “When something goes wrong, that changes the metric and the conversation about performance improvement,” she says. “There is a lot to be said for having incremental improvement over time.”

There is also a need for health and safety professionals to be forward-looking and consider how new and emerging issues impact on the organisations they support. “These include older drivers, fatigue, the gig economy and climate change,” she adds. “Continuous professional development and the health and safety continuum go hand in hand.”

“I speak to a lot of business owners and HR professionals who want to help protect their workforce, but do not have an understanding of how,” says Steven Harris, Managing Director of Integrity HSE. “They knee-jerk into mental health first-aiders and coffee groups. Your EHS professional can help them with the most efficient and effective means to address the issue: risk assessment. If your company has a mental health strategy that is not informed by a suitable and sufficient risk assessment, then you are failing your stakeholders, and often their families and communities too.”

Larger companies are much more likely to have a strategy around mental health, with 83 per cent having one in place compared to 76 per cent for those with 50-250 employees, and just 51 per cent for small businesses. It’s a similar situation with governance, with 76 per cent of larger businesses having a strategy, which contrasts with 58 per cent of medium-sized businesses and 59 per cent of small firms.

This is no surprise to Rachel Butler, Head of Health, Safety and Risk at Bruntwood. “That’s probably to be expected because, with the larger organisations, there’s a team of people purely looking at governance and strategies,” she says. “But the hardest part is implementing them. I’ve had experience with both large and smaller organisations, and it’s often the smaller ones that work better towards strategies. Although it may not be written down, it’s easier to get that communication piece across consistently.”

Engaging employees

Organisations are adopting a range of strategies to help boost employee compliance. There’s a strong emphasis here on training and development, which 68 per cent of respondents are deploying, up from 61 per cent a year before. A similar number (64%) are focusing on workplace culture, while half are looking to address limitations to skills or expertise within the health and safety function itself (up from 45% the year before). Linked to this, 44 per cent are seeking to prevent workforce churn, which has increased from 41 per cent.

This was reflected in some of the comments from the survey respondents that informed this report. One individual said they were actively recruiting for new talent, while another spoke about an emphasis on developing existing staff. Others pointed to the use of apprenticeships and talent management programmes to help open up career pathways for employees.

Made to measure

A vital part of health and safety is ensuring that performance is measured and monitored, typically through the use of key performance indicators (KPIs). But the survey paints a mixed picture of just what is being recorded and raises concerns over whether organisations are paying this enough attention.

The most common metrics used are all accident rates and near misses, but even these are only recorded by 73 per cent and 67 per cent of companies respectively. Other measures include observations (59%), lost time accident rate (56%) and total incident frequency rate (56%).

“For businesses to understand what’s going on within their sphere of influence is important, irrespective of their size,” says Dr McDonnell. “Then you can identify evidence-based interventions that can be scalable to the size of your organisation to learn from safety failures. Through understanding data, you can make a difference in terms of reducing absenteeism and work-related ill-health. There’s a real opportunity for development from understanding underpinning data.”

John Barnacle-Bowd, Vice President for Environment, Health & Safety at RS Group, believes organisations should be measuring as many metrics as possible. “I like to measure all accidents, lost time accidents and near-miss reporting, including hazard-spotting, unsafe acts, unsafe conditions and real near misses,” he says. “Having effective programmes in reporting near misses helps to capture issues before they become your next accident. However, I would not specifically set a KPI or a number against near misses. This needs to grow naturally through education and awareness.”

Butler urges organisations to adopt a more positive approach to KPIs, to avoid the risk that they become tick-box exercises. “For me, KPIs are more about keeping people interested,” she says. “They should be measuring tools to keep us continually improving. I'd like to see KPIs as leading indicators, such as what went right rather than near-misses.

“We’ve placed KPIs on the number of things that have been closed out, so something that may lead to or cause an incident, like a trailing cable, for example,” she adds. “You can either report it and move on because your KPI tells you to do that, or resolve the issue by removing the cable and reporting it as closed out. We need a culture of do-ers rather than reporters.”