Safety professionals do not have an easy job. When they succeed nothing happens, when they fail someone gets hurt. It takes a will of steel and a huge amount of positivity to take on such a role. In addition, even when the safety regime in a company is clearly articulated and policed the EHS manager is reliant on their staff and contractors to adhere to policy. A recent report from ISHN entitled, “2015 EHS State of the Nation”, puts this quandary as the Number 1 challenge that EHS managers will face in 2015.
The survey was taken from safety professionals, managers and plant managers in large companies – 500+ employees worldwide – and took place over December 2014. Respondents tended to be from hard-hat industries such as oil & gas, construction and manufacturing.
Forty-five percent of pros say employee-related discipline will be one of their biggest challenges in 2015
Compliance is a two-fold concern for safety professionals as, on the one hand, there is the challenge of getting training completed and logged but also there is the compliance challenge of ensuring that staff will implement this training. How do managers instil in all employees the imperative of safety processes? This is a difficult one to answer but it comes down to creating and maintaining a safety culture throughout the company. Building this means winning the hearts and minds of management and staff alike. Companies that have built strong safety cultures have found that continuous training is essential and strong visible backing from all management together can create the conditions in which workers start to see safety culture as something that is valuable in and of itself rather than just as a means to an end. Companies like Shell have been proactive in this area with their Goal Zero campaign to operate without any fatalities despite working in very challenging environments.
Safety training of employees is the most-often cited goal of professionals for 2015 (61%)
Delivering relevant safety training to employees is clearly an ongoing concern for safety professionals. It is not sufficient to give training just at the beginning of an employment. Training must be delivered in response to changing work practices and technologies. However, with challenges such as dispersed work sites, inconsistent training and a lack of testing of workers safety professionals are hard pressed to get this training over the line successfully. Face-to-face training is a great way to deliver information but advances in online training platforms are quickly taking over. The pressures of face-to-face training are being replaced with a more streamlined approach that builds testing and record keeping into the process from the start. Ask any safety officer what the ultimate goal is for their safety training program and they will tell you it is to have all staff and contractors trained and tested in advance of starting work. Luckily that is an achievable goal in 2015 with software solutions where face-to-face used to be the only option.
Employee safety and health engagement / participation / accountability is a 2015 goal for 54%
Like we have said, central to employee engagement and accountability is the building of a safety culture in an organisation. However, achieving employee engagement can be done in a variety of ways.
- Regular safety meetings and updates are very important. They can be done either formally or informally.
- The use of mentoring programs in a company is one which engages both the mentor and mentee with safety and have been proven to increase accountability as the safety relationship is personal rather than between worker and management.
- Near miss reporting involves all workers in the safety reporting process and highlights danger points in a work site.
- Safety drills can help to reinforce safety training. Most workers are familiar with the fire drill and being ready to act in that event but it is also possible to build safety drills that are specific to your work site, eg, fall protection drills, accident drills and so on.
- Finally, there is no harm in always having a Suggestion Box on site to get feedback from workers on how things can be improved. These are just a few ideas that, if implemented, could make a big difference to employee engagement with health and safety in the workplace.
In contrast, only 36% say a goal in 2015 is senior leadership safety and health engagement / participation / accountability
There is no doubt that all safety professionals want the full backing and support of senior management but their engagement and participation is not the most pressing issue when it is the workers themselves who are on the frontline of workplace incidents. That said, nearly 2 in 5 safety professionals recognize that this goal of management engagement is one to be worked upon. Essentially, a company’s safety record will be improved by engagement organisation wide. Addressing senior management on the value to the company of improving health and safety is a type of advocacy work that all departments have to do. Safety pros are no different in that they will have to continually advocate for their department and its value to the company as a whole. Sadly, it is not enough to just assume senior managers will take workers welfare as seriously as they do!
