With 28 million working days lost every year in the UK due to work-related injury and ill-health[1], it has never been more important for employers to take steps to establish a positive and effective health and safety culture at work.
Put simply, by creating an environment where all staff – from the boardroom to the shopfloor – take health and safety seriously, companies can reduce the risk of injury and ill-health, comply with the law and secure savings through lower absence rates and reduced turnover. Companies with good safety records also enjoy an improved standing among customers, suppliers, partners and investors, and benefit from higher productivity due to happier, healthier and better motivated employees.
Effective leadership
Two of the most effective ways of establishing an exemplary safety culture are effective leadership by the board of directors and senior managers and involving employees in all aspects of health and safety decision-making and problem-solving.
The British Safety Council is keen to spread best practice in this area and to this end, published a report[2] earlier this year detailing the innovative and successful approaches to leadership, workforce involvement and safety culture adopted and practised by five of its member companies.
The aim was to produce a short, concise booklet giving examples of effective safety culture, which would inform and inspire other companies to go beyond the basic requirements of health and safety law and become leaders in engaging people in safety at all levels of their organisation.
The five organisations featured – adidas, Dawn Group, Diageo Runcorn Packaging, Linklaters law firm and Wylfa Power Station (Magnox North) – were chosen from among the 40 that achieved a British Safety Council Sword of Honour safety award in 2009. As such, all 40 have excellent safety management systems and are in the vanguard of health and safety practice.
The case studies look at how the organisations have engaged directors, managers, workers and contractors in health and safety, and the resulting health, safety and productivity benefits. The companies adopt a broad range of approaches to securing worker involvement in health and safety and demonstrating leadership by the directors on this issue.
For a start, all but one of the five have put their directors or equivalent through some kind of health and safety training, and all say the directors “lead” in one way or another. In some, the MD or equivalent regularly addresses the whole of the workforce on health and safety issues, and sometimes this involves shutting down production completely. This demonstrates the importance the organisation gives to health and safety and focuses the mind of the audience.
At Wylfa Power Station, for instance, the site 'stands down' five or six times a year so that the site director or a senior manager can address all staff and contractors on safety issues. According to Fred Brookes, the site’s safety manager, the stand-down indicates the importance of the briefing and also ensures “everyone gets the same message”.
Another approach designed to ensure that directors and managers lead on health and safety is requiring managers to sign up to a series of safety commitments. At Diageo Runcorn Packaging in Cheshire, all managers underwent training on their health and safety responsibilities and were required to commit to adopting ten 'leadership behaviours' – such as always visibly challenging actions that threaten safety.
Diageo believes the programme has been a big success, and, alongside measures to engage the workforce in safety, has led to a marked reduction in the overall number of accidents and their severity.
Workforce involvement
Workforce involvement also plays a huge part in establishing a positive safety culture, and unsurprisingly, all five of the companies have extensive programmes to secure staff engagement. These include regular safety meetings and tool-box talks, formal safety committees, large numbers of safety representatives drawn from the workforce and contractor base and comprehensive safety reporting systems.
At Diageo Runcorn, the Safety Issue Reporting (SIR) system allows members of staff and contractors to raise health, safety and welfare 'issues' that require action. The reports are analysed at a monthly meeting chaired by the site manager and the employee making the report is also expected to satisfy themselves that the issue has been closed out – further driving staff engagement.
According to Bill Cross, the plant’s health, safety and environmental advisor, many of the safety improvements implemented at the site in recent years are a direct result of issues raised by the workforce through the SIR system. “Employees can see that their safety suggestions are acknowledged and acted upon,” he says, “which has resulted in the SIR system having had the biggest impact on the workforce in terms of continuous improvement of the safety management system.”
For many of the five companies, worker engagement extends beyond direct employees to the staff of contractors. Some involve contractors’ staff in safety initiatives as a matter of course, and most have contractors on their safety committees, which allows them to extend their safety culture and also to learn from the contractors.
At construction company Dawn Group, subcontractors have received health and safety training and are encouraged to fully participate in all safety initiatives. The contractors have suggested safety improvements of their own – such as requiring a supervisor from each subcontractor to carry out a daily safety inspection of the whole site, rather than just their own work areas – and these ideas have been rolled out across all of the company’s sites.
Dawn Group believes its efforts to engage contractors on safety have led to lower injury and absence rates, higher staff morale and an enhanced corporate image.
Wellness programmes
Other approaches used by the five companies to secure workforce engagement in safety include health and well-being campaigns – such as wellness programmes for staff – competitions and incentive schemes.
At global law firm Linklaters, for example, a rolling programme of health and well-being initiatives – such as ergonomic roadshows for computer users and an annual blood pressure and cholesterol test day – has led to significant improvements in the early reporting of ill-health symptoms and requests for preventative interventions. The company believes that staff are now more knowledgeable about their well-being in general, which has led to a marked reduction in sickness absence.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the report shows that engaging directors, managers, workers and contractors in health and safety can have significant benefits in terms of lower accident and ill health rates, improved staff morale and productivity, and enhanced corporate reputation.
The British Safety Council hopes that other organisations can learn from the efforts of the five companies featured, and to help spread the message, is making the report available free of charge on its website.
[1] HSE annual health and safety statistics 2009/10
[2] ‘Transforming the culture of workplace health and safety’
See also: 'Profit over wellbeing?' by Dr. Doug Wright in The People Bulletin, August 2010