With many practitioners, particularly those in the public sector, facing significant cuts to their health and safety budgets, Peter Roddis suggests the profession should be less focused on the technical aspects of the job and take a wider, more active business perspective instead.
The challenge of maintaining high levels of safety under difficult circumstances has arguably never been greater. Indeed, health and safety practitioners could be some of the casualties of the biggest round of public-sector spending cuts since the Second World War.
The figures make for stark reading: public-sector spending cuts of £81 billion, a 25-per-cent slash in local-government funding,1 and 140,000 council jobs disappearing.2 The distress will not be confined to the public sector, as, inevitably, large swathes of the private sector will also be hard hit by reductions in procurement spending.3 No one will be spared the harsh realities of the economic crisis,4 but cutting costs must not translate into cutting corners in keeping people at work healthy and safe.5 Consequently, practitioners in both sectors need to be up to the challenge of delivering services that offer real value in uncertain times.
What are you trying to achieve?
As technical specialists, practitioners are often involved in a fairly passive exchange of information and advice. They try to take a holistic approach, but do they really take the time to stand back and reflect on the whole collection of services they deliver?
Auditing provides a prime example of this, as non-compliance is often seen as a local fault, but an effective system should alert managers that something is wrong. This illustrates the importance of evaluating audit outcomes to identify trends and improvements to the safety management system.
When we audit and find significant issues in a service, we allocate a member of staff to support the service by taking the necessary action to rectify the problem. At first, this change of approach was difficult because we had to do less of what we had traditionally done; in effect, we had to learn to focus on work that provided clear value.
Practitioners often see organisations as command and control hierarchies; if the boss says something is important then everyone will follow. This certainly helps, but it’s only part of the picture. A related problem in large organisations is that we often have more than one client to satisfy. Senior managers, for example, seek assurance that the organisation is compliant with legal requirements, while local managers are looking for more hands-on support.
While the legal argument is compelling, managers also need to understand that failure to control health and safety risks properly can have a damaging effect on the business. Practitioners need to be more effective at communicating this message to managers, by using more sophisticated business arguments to justify changes to the way that safety is managed. The arguments need to relate to risk, opportunity and efficiency as part of an overall approach to corporate governance.6 To achieve this, practitioners need to develop an active-partnership approach.
Active partnership
Active partnership requires understanding of the pressures and demands on our client partners. These include financial, political, cultural and hierarchical pressures and constraints. Honda expresses this as san gen shugi, which basically means that to provide practical, cost-effective solutions you need first-hand knowledge of the business.
At Nottinghamshire County Council, we have maintained lead roles in the team and developed networks to get closer to departments and key services by nominating key senior managers as sponsors. They play a key role in their department, leading and coordinating safety management, and are a useful ally on the management team.
This active partnership also provides opportunities to understand and share challenges. As a practitioner, you get to see the bigger picture and tend to take a more pragmatic approach. When they need support, managers know who to contact and have confidence in your service.
This business-focused relationship is often described in the HR world as business partnering. In the mid-1990s Ulrich identified key roles that HR must fulfil to transform itself into a ‘value-adding function’.7 This involves working with managers to support strategic business issues by designing effective systems and processes. It also requires services to be structured in such a way that they can respond quickly to changing priorities, and, as a result, become more customer-focused and cost-efficient. All of this applies to our professional role, as well.
It is crucial to know that you are focused on the right things and that your actions are adding value. It is also essential to communicate a clear picture of what you are trying to achieve and to demonstrate a clear ‘line of sight’ between what you are doing and managers’ objectives. Aims and programmes that are clearly set out and regularly reviewed help the client understand what the service is doing and where the priorities lie.
This has provided real benefits for us and we try to ensure that everything we do relates to these objectives. We have established an effective ‘compliance board’, chaired by one of the directors and attended by each of the departmental health and safety sponsors. This allows us to raise non-compliance issues at the highest level and know that prompt action will be taken. Now, senior managers sometimes approach us to audit services rather than us having to do the initial leg work.
Risk priorities
While an emphasis on legislation and individual liability at board level is likely to frighten many directors into action, an over-reliance on such messages will fail to truly grab their interest and commitment in the long term.
An organisation trying to make savings needs to take a risk-based, goal-setting approach. Practitioners striving to identify risk priorities tend to rely too heavily on accident trends and statistics, which only provide a partial picture. A fuller perspective can be gained by considering audit outcomes, accident investigations and inspections, which often leads to improvements. However, it is not very often that they analyse all of this information together in order to learn what the most significant issues are and to evaluate compliance.
Finding non-conformity issues by auditing in this way allows you to identify risk priorities and provide a better understanding of what is wrong for the client. Working with the service to address these priority issues means you are more likely to be adding value. Similarly, waste is reduced because you are unlikely to do more than is required. By working with the client you are enabling them to drive improvements, with less ongoing input from yourself. Expectations are clear and more easily met because the client has been involved in the audit process and agreed the outcome following discussion with the practitioner.
It seems counter-intuitive but we need to encourage our organisations to be less risk averse. There needs to be less focus on trivial risks and more attention given to significant risks. Managers need to understand that it is acceptable to focus on risk priorities rather than trying to remove all risks from the workplace. The pragmatic approach we have taken has seen managers respond much more positively and take far more notice when we raise really significant issues with them.
Systems
Few realise how pervasive systems are, how they underpin everything we do, and how influential they are in creating many of the difficulties that confront us. Both practitioners and clients need to understand that the greatest opportunity for change is achieved when the organisation is understood as a system.8 A good safety management system should increase the efficiency of the organisation’s processes, increase the effectiveness of its health and safety programmes, and strengthen its safety credibility with customers, governments and communities.9
As practitioners, it is often rewarding to be out on site inspecting, identifying problems and getting things put right. What is sometimes forgotten is that non-systemic change fails in the long term because it does not alter the underlying reason for the problem. Unless you find out why the system has allowed a non-conformity to occur then it will simply reoccur in a different place or time.
Practitioners need to realise that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to service delivery in large organisations, and develop the expertise required to identify and deal with a variety of customer demands. They need courage, tenacity, experience and ability to work on their own initiative and deliver services that the client needs to survive.
Many assume that this will increase costs because smarter people cost more. However, the reality is that the service “learns to do the value work – and only that – and non-value work is driven out of the system. As waste is removed capacity increases, service improves, and costs fall.”8
Practitioners need to refine their skills and knowledge to be able to communicate more effectively with senior managers and, for some, this requires up-skilling. In our organisation, we require staff to hold a diploma or a degree in health and safety, as well as being full or graduate members of IOSH. We also expect them to refine their skills and knowledge, so that they are able to communicate more effectively – and it is this which we have found to be one of the most difficult changes. For some people, systems-thinking presents a difficult paradigm shift. On the whole we have been successful, but there is still room for improvement because, at times, it requires behaviour that seems counter-intuitive to some staff.
Summary
As long as there is a legal duty to protect employees’ health and safety, we should continue to see most organisations employing competent practitioners in some form, and the number and type of practitioners employed will need to meet the requirements of the business. However, in a time of economic crisis this can be difficult to maintain.
One of the most fundamental changes described above is the need to move away from a passive technical service to a more active partnership with the client. In our case, this not only raised the profile of health and safety but gave a clearer understanding of what the service is trying to achieve.
First-hand knowledge of the client’s business has enabled the provision of practical and cost-effective solutions that meet expectations and have been well-received. A clear line of sight between what practitioners are doing and the organisation’s objectives has resulted in greater engagement and sense of purpose for both client and practitioner.
Taking a systems-based approach has enabled the organisation to focus on risk priorities. Audits have become more meaningful and productive, and allowed us to focus scarce resources where they are most needed. Our initiative to seek third-party assessment against the OHSAS standard has raised our profile with certain high-risk services and driven improvement in those areas.
Like all services across the authority, we have had to make savings, but this has been on the basis that we continue to change and develop this new way of working. Only time will tell how effective these changes have been but we have seen some positive effects already.
In this challenging new world of cost-cutting, practitioners need to exert greater influence on their organisations. In doing so, they will need to design their services more carefully and equip themselves with the skills to manage change. If they are to be successful in this, they should understand that the most effective change is a system change.
References
1 www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10924719
2 www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12116841
3 Deloitte Economic Review, Q4 2010, ‘A bumpy road to recovery’
4 PM David Cameron, speaking at the Open University, 7 June 2010
5 IOSH (2010): Getting the balance right, Institution of Occupational Safety and Health response to the Young Report, ‘Common sense, common safety’
6 HSE (2006): Defining best practice in corporate occupational health and safety governance, prepared by Acona Ltd for the HSE
7 Ulrich, D (1997): Human resource champions: the next agenda for adding value and delivering results, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press
8 Seddon, J (2008): Systems thinking in the public sector, Triarchy Press
9 Tess, Lynn M (2002): ‘Implementation and integration of a safety management system within an ISO 14000 and ISO 9000-certified facility’, presented at the ASSE Professional Development Conference and Exposition, June 9-12 2002, Nashville, Tennessee
Peter Roddis is services head, health and safety, for Nottinghamshire County Council spoke on this topic at the IOSH Conference on 16 March.
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