Our staff has been creating, implementing and auditing Health & Safety management systems for over 25 years. Our expertise in this area allows us to create a system that is going to be operationally effective within your organization. If an organization is planning to implement a management system, with the expectation that it will be effective in reducing risk and unwanted events, it must fully understand the benefits, challenges and pitfalls before undertaking this endeavor. Especially in organizations that are not “systems / process” oriented, this undertaking will require a well-planned and well-communicated approach.
Many management systems that are assessed and certified as “conforming” are not truly effective. The effectiveness expectation needs to be built into the system from the start and appropriately evaluated on an on-going basis. Truly effective management systems take years to mature. From our experience assessing hundreds of organizations throughout the world, we typically find the following shortcomings in management systems (Health & Safety, Environmental, Quality, etc.) in use today:
- Many organizations have implemented a consensus standard-based system to meet the needs of a supply chain or corporate expectation, and are not using it on a daily basis
- The site is “certified”, but the system isn’t really working
- The communication and knowledge of the system and its functionality is poorly understood throughout the organization
- The system is not capturing all of the risk and processes associated with the operation
- The system is not designed or assessed for its effectiveness in meeting the expectations of the Health & Safety Policy expectations
Our forte is the creation of customized management systems that are forward-looking and specific to organizational needs. The attributes of these systems include:
- Integration into business and functional processes/systems (e.g., Quality, Environmental)
- Applicable to a wide variety of operations (e.g., size, functionality, location)
- Performance driven expectations
- Creation of operationally common processes (e.g., one approach to causal analysis across the organization)
- Integrated with existing consensus standards (e.g., ISO/ANSI)
- Purposefully designed for effectiveness realization and measurement, not just conformance
The key benefits of deploying our management system approach include:
- Moving to a more strategic and proactive approach to managing Health & Safety risks
- Increasing cross functional sharing and efficiency which will ultimately have a positive impact on the job of the first line supervisor and in turn, improve operational performance and culture
- Providing a great driver for upfront employee engagement in problem identification and solving; and thereby creating buy-in and sustainable solutions
- Teaming with other functional staff/systems to share the benefits of each function’s skill sets
- The system will define high level performance expectations applicable to all company operations. Company operations will have the latitude to vary the implementation to fit local needs as long as the performance elements are in place and sustainable
- The system will define and measure the “health” of all Health & Safety program elements to ensure constancy and efficiency of deployment. Example: An overarching training/education management system approach that would apply to the development, deployment and assessment of all Health & Safety training.
- Allowing for the development of more meaningful and predictive measures of Health & Safety risk/performance
- Increasing the predictability of outcomes through the understanding that systems shortcomings ultimately lead to unwanted outcomes. The number of recorded/reported injuries is not a good indicator of future injury (especially serious or fatal injury) potential
- Ensuring when shortcomings are identified, corrective actions will be systemic rather than outcome specific
- Developing a team of management system experts that can add value to the other business functions. Systems knowledge will allow a company to build more effective processes, enhance process failure prediction and causal factors analysis skill-sets. These skills will grow the capacity and organizational value of your Health & Safety staff
