Health and safety professionals are adopting different strategies to ensure people are safe, with 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 many respondents to the 2024 Health & Safety Report, produced by RS, feel they have some way to go on the journey to becoming a truly mature function. Only 39 per cent put their business maturity level as high, compared to 54 per cent, who opt for medium, and seven per cent state this is at a low level.
The most common Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) strategies are largely as would be expected, with accident management topping the list at 86 per cent, followed by systems (83%) and fire prevention and management (82%).
But three-quarters (75%) now have a strategy around mental health, reflecting the growing awareness among health and safety professionals of this topic, and an acceptance this is now part of the EHS remit.
“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,” said 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 which is not informed by a suitable and sufficient risk assessment, then you are failing your stakeholders, and often their families and communities too.”
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.
“Getting health and safety right requires a daily focus on embedding what works in organisations, irrespective of their size,” she said.
“It needs a consistent approach 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.
“When something goes wrong, it changes the metric and the conversation about performance improvement. 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. Continuous professional development and the health and safety continuum go hand in hand,” she added.
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 only 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 said.
“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 communication across consistently.”
Made to measure
A vital part of health and safety is ensuring performance is measured and monitored, typically through the use of key performance indicators (KPIs). But the survey paints a mixed picture of 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%).
Dr McDonald said: “For businesses to understand what’s going on within their sphere of influence is important, irrespective of their size. Then you can identify evidence-based interventions which 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 said.
“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 of becoming tick-box exercises.
“For me, KPIs are more about keeping people interested,” she said. “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 which have been closed out, so something that may lead to or cause an incident, like a trailing cable, for example.
“You can either report it and move on because your KPI tells you, or resolve the issue by removing the cable and reporting it as closed out. We need a culture of do-ers rather than reporters.”
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 informing 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.
Download the 2024 Health and Safety Report: Striving for Excellence
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