Robin Stowell explains how managing organisational competence can bring a new dimension to measuring health and safety performance.
There are myriad leading and lagging indicators that can be used to measure and monitor safety performance in organisations, as Neil Budworth described in his series of articles on the subject in these same pages earlier this year.1,2,3
The challenge for safety practitioners is to have at their disposal a balanced suite of indicators and to judge what are the right ones to use at the right time, in order to ensure risk management is both robust and effective (see figure 1).
The incident rate is a lagging indicator often used to measure, demonstrate and drive safety performance. While ‘zero harm’ policies are an admirable aspiration, they often reflect a misguided interpretation of safety management standards and senior management’s commitment to the prevention of injury.
There is a number of reasons why incident rates are used as lagging indicators. Accident data is easy to measure and collect; easy to present internally and externally to relevant departments and organisations; and cost-effective in terms of the technology and staff required.
If used in isolation, the incident rate might result in an unbalanced approach, but the common leading-indicator methods — auditing, behaviour/culture assessment and inspection — can all produce time lags before action is taken and incident prevention is realised. Hence, if focus is skewed towards leading-performance indicators, the opportunity to prevent an incident may be missed.
An often overlooked leading indicator, capable of providing an accurate, ‘real-time’ picture of safety performance is organisational competence. The reason why it gets neglected is that the policies set by organisations tend not to ask for it. Instead, it is assumed that HR-led development and training are sufficient in determining individual competence, so organisational competence is rarely introduced systematically throughout a business.
Measuring
Individual competency can be defined and measured, although there are many options via which this can be done. In general terms, it can be defined as a combination of knowledge, training, qualifications, experience and qualities appropriate to the individual’s duties. Suffice it to say that competency is a function of specified requirements, and, as such, it can be categorised either quantifiably or qualitatively in the same way that risks can be classified.
For every task that has a risk assessment, there are employees exposed to those risks, and they will have defined competencies. As HSG654 states: “Levels of supervision are determined by the risk of the job and the competence of the person.”
The next key step is to match the risk categories for its operations and the competence categories of its individuals. The resulting matrix provides the level of supervision required, an example of which is shown in figure 2. This indicates the ability for that specific employee (or team) to undertake that task at a defined level of supervision, i.e. a person-task supervision requirement.
Managing
Arguably, the best form of supervision is self-supervision, which is essentially the process of enabling as many individuals (or teams) in the organisation to supervise their own work as far as possible, i.e. where no additional specified requirements, or resource inputs are needed to undertake the task. The usual practice of applying risk management to reduce risk categories already impacts this without additional effort.
By managing competence categories there can be an equally powerful impact on the levels of supervision required. However, for this to occur, senior management must make a commitment to achieving organisational competence through an improvement in levels of self-supervision. A policy statement to this effect should then drive the plan-do-check-act cycle of competence management within the organisation’s existing management system.
Monitoring
By setting the total number of person-tasks where self-supervision is achieved against all the organisation’s tasks provides a ratio of organisational competence — a measurable and usable key performance indicator.
Setting a threshold allows management of organisational competence within desired limits, and provides a warning when a shortage of organisational competence puts the company at risk. But, in the same way that ‘zero harm’ is an unrealistic target, so is 100-per-cent organisational competence at all times.
Predicting
As a leading indicator based on known inputs (risk and competence categories), it is possible to assess the level of organisational competence at a specific point in time. It can also be evaluated continuously, allowing predictions to be made.
Being able to calculate the risk of future tasks and the individual competencies available allows improvements and actions to be made in good time. Similarly, the impact of losing personnel can be assessed and managed accordingly (see figure 3). The accuracy of any predictions will, of course, depend largely on the quality of data input into the competence management system.
Integrating
There comes a time in the evolution of most companies when its senior management becomes conscious of a need to improve safety performance. This is often driven by enforcement, moral integrity, business competitiveness, or a combination.
This generally leads to the implementation of a safety management system designed to meet the requirements of a recognised standard — for example, OHSAS 18001, or HSG65. However, these standards are just sets of minimum requirements for a particular aspect of business, and are rarely integrated into the larger enterprise. Even the most effective, well-implemented safety management system can allow organisations to ignore human behavioural aspects.
It may be tempting to introduce an off-the-shelf (or online) solution for managing safety, but this approach can fall down on two key points — the people in the organisation not only need to be participants in the development of the solution but they also need to be effective in its implementation.
The use of an off-the-shelf safety management system may lead to an initial improvement in safety performance, but eventually, through adding more procedures and checks into the system, a ceiling will be reached. From a manager’s viewpoint, a mature safety management system can become overly bureaucratic, while workers can find it unusable. This can lead to all parties losing trust in the system and local work-arounds becoming accepted practice.
Using an holistic approach to management requires a new mindset for understanding the complexity of organisational functions. Management requires a process architecture focused on design, control and development of purpose-orientated social and commercial systems. This should tie together all the particular elements considered necessary and sufficient into the overall context of the organisation’s business — i.e. it converts health and safety policy into safety performance by recognising that the organisation’s people are the root to success.
An effective model5 to achieve this transition to safety integrated management is shown in figure 4. This merges the requirements of OHSAS 18001 (on the organisational side — shaded green), the influences of behavioural safety (short-term individual actions — shaded blue) and the tasks of HR management (shaded grey).
A significant difference over the static plan-do-check-act model is the integration of a number of different elements to form a whole, comprising several dimensions — for example, organisation and individual-related; short and long-term; static and dynamic components. Moreover, all components of this management system are presented with their mutual effects on each other factored into the equation.
Some components are highly complex sub-systems themselves, while others are simple and can be implemented immediately. This approach enables the previously independent actions between the safety management system, human-resources management and individuals to form stronger dependencies, which not only brings the traditional safety management system to life but empowers individuals to take greater responsibility for safety performance.
Building on established foundations
It is easy to view the HR department as one that is just concerned with hiring and firing. Two approaches are often seen: using standard criteria and standard profiles aimed at the average person (using a round peg for a round hole); and an overly detailed job description that is impossible to fill (the ‘superhuman’).
While it might make sense to specify an initial set of individual competencies for a particular role, people are individuals with different strengths, some of which may not yet be fully realised. The art of good HR management is to identify and build on these strengths to develop competencies and enable a higher degree of self-supervision.
First and foremost, supervision must be based on trust, both in people’s capabilities and in their willingness to perform. If we cannot trust that these requirements are met, the problem is not one of supervision but a completely different one — for example, staff retention.
So, an advantage of integrating organisational competence using this methodology is that it can build on existing management systems. Size of the organisation is not relevant, but complexity determines the degree of detail to which the individual components are shaped. To draw a parallel, in a small two-seater aircraft you only need a few simple instruments to fly, while an intercontinental airliner requires appropriately sophisticated avionics.
Summary
Implementing, managing and assessing organisational competence requires a policy and commitment from senior management to build it into an existing management system framework. However, it also needs an integrated approach to unite the requirements of the management system with HR management and other individual aspects.
Categorising the risks to which the organisation is exposed and the competencies of individuals can be used to generate an assessment of the level of supervision required. This allows management to identify areas where action is needed and to allocate resources appropriately. As people and business activities change, so will the measure of organisational competence.
If implemented in a predictive competence management system, actions can be taken before the organisation puts itself at risk. There is no ultimate goal but a continual focus on maintaining the desired level of organisational competence.
There are clear long-term benefits to be realised by using predictive actions to prevent incidents, but the potential cost-savings through efficient and effective allocation of resources are also unlikely to go unnoticed by directors and managers.
References
4 HSG65, inset 6, diagram 4
5 The safety integrated management system is based on the Malik Integrated Management System®, as described in Malik, F (2010): Management: The essence of the craft
Robin Stowell is managing director of Conversulting Ltd.
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