As Lord Young left the stage, an air of anticipation accompanied the arrival of John Crackett, managing director of Central Networks and board member for health, safety and the environment at E.ON, for his keynote interview with Gavin Esler.
Crackett’s use of personal experiences to illustrate his message guaranteed him a spellbound audience. From the first question fired at him by Esler: “Do you really care about health and safety, and, if so, why?” his passion came across loud and clear.
Yes, he said, he does care, because he’s had the experience of running a plant where two people were badly injured. He knows the suffering those injuries caused at every level, from the injured men and their families to the employee whose innocent actions triggered the accident – and to Crackett himself, who thought he was doing a good thing, generating electricity for people, and then this happened.
That personal story illustrated Crackett’s key point that health and safety is about commitment at every level, from board members to employees. Health and safety shouldn’t be seen as a single big issue, he said. Rather, it’s a lot of small issues that relate to every worker at every level, and which need to be prioritised at board level.
Challenged with the view that health and safety isn’t profitable for businesses, Crackett underlined the huge productivity and reputational costs associated with unsafe processes and accidents.
He then spoke of the importance of empowering shop-floor workers through education, training, and the quality of first-line supervision, and of the ongoing commitment needed to ensure that the board-level vision of health and safety isn’t diluted at shop-floor level.
The challenge, he said, lies in building the commitment of every individual to engage with health and safety – and he had a store of advice to give about how to achieve that, from providing cost/benefit analyses for proposed measures to using the power of personal experiences to help people understand what’s at stake. “We need to make health and safety relevant,” he said, describing a range of tools such as computer-based, theatre-based and on-site training that relates directly to each person’s job.
In the end, said Crackett, there are both moral and financial reasons for a commitment to health and safety. “Every worker has a right to work in safety,” he said. “And good safety means good business”.
