Organisations are positive about their health and safety capabilities, but it is crucial to prevent complacency and ensure issues like mental health receive due attention.
That was a key finding of the 2024 Health & Safety Report, produced by RS. The report found that most organisations are confident in their basic safety measures. Almost nine in 10 respondents said they feel highly capable in protecting employees (88%) and end-users (89%), with 80 per cent rating their systems, reporting, leadership and governance for Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) at a high level.
Engineer climbing on the ladder to the roof, wearing safety harness belt during working at height site.
Ryan Plummer, senior director at RS Safety Solutions, said this was reassuring, but warned against over-confidence. He also emphasised the importance of maintaining an elevated level of compliance and taking health and safety seriously.
“If you’re 100 per cent confident, then complacency can set in,” said Plummer. “And that doesn’t take into account issues like staff turnover or new equipment, which means you have to change processes or the type of PPE you use.”.
John Barnacle-Bowd, vice president of global health, safety and environment at RS Group, highlighted the risk of complacency with practices like tracking days since the last accident.
“That can lead to complacency because people think they’re safe,” he said.
His advice is for organisations to bring in people from outside who can provide a fresh perspective on any health and safety issues.
“You have to be completely honest with yourself,” he said. “We’re starting an audit process for our distribution centres and I’m not having people audit their own work. We had an audit in Corby last month and I brought an employee who does safety in EMEA over from Germany to do the audit. It’s a new person with a fresh set of eyes.
“Everyone who does safety has different skill sets and will see different things from their own experience. That can help to break any complacency.”
Company culture and safety
Confidence dipped slightly regarding the broader safety culture within organisations, with 76 per cent rating it highly.
Steven Harris, managing director of Integrity HSE, acknowledged the challenge in assessing safety culture. He suggested starting with education about safety culture and collaborating with the workforce to address aspects that lead to unplanned events.
“The term culture contains several factors which are very difficult to measure individually, like values, attitudes and perceptions, but when they are combined to create a collective workforce behaviour, it takes on a whole new level of complexity,” he said.
Medium-sized organisations are most confident in their health and safety capabilities (85%), compared to 80 per cent of small firms and 78 per cent of larger organisations.
“There is a risk that health and safety can be lost as businesses grow,” said Barnacle-Bowd. “If you employ 10 more people but don’t increase the size of the health and safety team to manage the new contracts, that will have an impact. We need to keep health and safety on the agenda and let that grow with resources and competence as the organisation gets bigger.”
Focusing on mental health
Within the health and safety profession, mental health is increasingly recognised as a crucial factor of an organisation’s strategy. The survey showed 55 per cent of companies are confident in their mental health capabilities, up from 52 per cent the previous year, but still behind physical harm (81%), PPE selection (80%) and disease prevention (69%).
“This is fundamentally important,” said Dr Karen McDonnell, occupational health and safety policy adviser at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). “Businesses need to recognise that employees are people with whole lives.
“There are situations that happen outside of work that they will ‘bring to work’ with them, like financial pressures, interpersonal relationships, not sleeping well and arriving tired at work. There need to be systems and structures in place to support employees, including those working in health and safety-related roles.”
Barnacle-Bowd highlighted the issue in male-dominated workforces, where discussing mental health is less common. He believes the lower confidence in handling mental health may stem from it being managed by HR in some organisations. And he advocates for health and safety teams to identify and address mental health issues, as poor mental health can lead to accidents.
“Historically, health and safety professionals have focused on physical health, but progressive safety professionals are now considering mental health,” he said. “We need to get the safety team and the people on the shopfloor trained on how to identify mental health issues. Poor mental health can lead to accidents.”
Download the 2024 Health and Safety Report: Striving for Excellence
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
