To open the second session of Day 1 of IOSH 10, conference chair Gavin Esler cut to the chase with keynote interviewee John Crackett by asking: do you really care about health and safety.
Crackett, who is managing director of E.ON Central Networks and a board member – safety, health and environment, replied that with the welfare of some 3500 employees to look after, the answer is, of course, yes.
He said: “Safety must start with commitment from the top. To achieve great safety the leaders in the business must treat it like any other form of leadership in business. It has to be seen as being as important as other business drivers, such as cash flow and productivity.”
He went on to explain that at E.ON, safety is the first item on the agenda of every board meeting. All managing directors are required to present a report on health and safety in their division, and all are expected to have achieved a level of health and safety competence. In addition, Crackett and his fellow board members spend time on the ground carrying out safety visits in order to engage with the company’s workers, and make sure that the workforce knows that safety is being taken seriously.
Gavin Esler was interested in this point and suggested that not all boards are as proactive on health and safety. What about those companies whose employees think their managers are just doing things to tick a box – to guard against potential litigation and insurance issues, he asked.
Crackett agreed that it very much depends on the culture that is created in the company. He said: “Boards are not unreceptive to the safety message – they just have a lot of other things on their mind! The imperative is to understand that good safety is good business, and to make the workforce understand that they need to behave safely themselves also.”
Challenged by Esler that businesses primarily exist to make a profit and so they are reluctant to spend money on something that doesn’t demonstrate an immediate return, Crackett disagreed: “There are two main reasons why directors must focus on health and safety. The moral reason is that people have the right to go home at the end of the day with the same number of digits, the same number of limbs, etc. The utilitarian reason is that safety is good for business. The costs of having an accident are huge.”
In response to a question from the floor on how to convince the board of this message in the current economic climate, Crackett reiterated the importance of starting at the very top of the organisation. He elaborated: “Engage the man or woman in overall charge and get their visible commitment. Then approach it in a very business-like way – cost out any proposals, do a cost-benefit analysis of any interventions. And don’t be afraid to resort to emotional and spiritual arguments, as well as the intellectual ones. Get the board to think about what sort of company they want to be. Get them to ask themselves: can we make health and safety one aspect of greatness as a company?”
Another delegate felt there was too much emphasis on the top-down approach and suggested that more should be done from the bottom up to ensure that the message and vision from the top don’t get diluted on the way down.
Crackett agreed, suggesting that the best approach to avoid such dilution is to convince everyone in all the layers of management going down that the organisation really is serious about health and safety. He said: “It is probably even more important to get through to the workers in an environment like E.ON’s, where we have many people working remotely in often hazardous conditions. Education, training and front-line supervision are all crucial. And the training has to be relevant – take the trainers out into the field, or on to the shop floor, so that they can train using real examples in real situations.”
The discussion then turned to the previous speaker, Lord Young (see our earlier report), and his proposals that the emergency services should be exempt from health and safety rules, to avoid situations such as police constables hesitating to dive into a river to save a drowning child because of fear of breaching such rules.
A delegate from Strathclyde Police suggested that it was all very well for Lord Young to lambast such situations but when there are currently (in a sub-judice case) three police colleagues under arrest in England for actions they took as a result of a dynamic risk assessment, the crucial thing is to determine a balance and just what is reasonably practical.
Crackett acknowledged that there is no easy answer, because striking such a balance is difficult, but “it is up to society as a whole to work it out”. Asked if he accepted Lord Young’s argument that all the media hype and ‘elf and safety stories are the biggest cultural barrier facing health and safety, he replied that while he is immensely irritated by the conkers-bonkers mentality “this is not because of the bureaucracy side but because it distracts attention from real issues and demeans those health and safety professionals trying to do a good job. Most of these stories result from the inept decisions of lazy jobsworths, or they are simply untrue.”
He concluded by stating that practitioners are the key to improving the image of health and safety. He said: “You must have two things: professionalism – know what you are talking about – and commercial understanding of the business. These two things together will give you credibility. I would suggest that you also need a bit of vision – to be able to paint a picture of a safer workplace for the future.”
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