My Best Ever Piece of Health and Safety Advice

My best ever piece of Health and Safety advice – design a dashboard for your Directors. Over the years I have seen many H&S professionals wring their hands over an apparent lack of buy-in from Senior Managers to improving health & safety performance - or even complying with minimum legislative requirements. To be honest, I’m not surprised, since Directors are human with finite attention span, and will direct their attention to whatever crisis is consuming the business that week - an upset customer, an overrun IT project, or unexpectedly poor financial results. Seemingly, health & safety can always wait until tomorrow - so why worry today? By way of comparison, one reason Directors focus on financial results is because there is usually a Finance Department feeding regular bulletins to Board members on performance against budget, balance sheets, profit & loss, turnover, cash in the bank, earnings, depreciation, and so forth. Board members can however remain surprisingly in the dark on the company’s level of H&S compliance, especially if there is no risk committee.

What is the trick to getting the Board to focus on health & safety matters?

We should therefore learn from our colleagues in Finance and give Directors a similar dashboard of key performance indicators (KPI’s) to help them understand how the business’ health & safety performance is stacking up against Policy objectives. My advice is to choose no more than 10 H&S KPI’s that are important to the business - and award each a simple numerical rating. If your organisation has an existing dashboard system – plagiarise it and don’t impose a numerical rating alien to the Board. If not, invent your own system so that each month, the Board pack contains an understandable H&S score on how the business is performing. The Arinite one page AFS 0070 Director Health & Safety Responsibilities factsheet outlines Directors responsibilities. Sign up to our newsletter to gain access to our factsheets, and exclusive expert information.

Performing against What?

Logically each KPI should be lifted from your H&S Policy objectives. For example, if your Policy states that all employees will receive H&S training, it shouldn’t be difficult to devise a KPI on what percentage of the workforce has actually been trained. There also needs to be a corresponding target for what percentage the Board realistically expects to be trained over the next 6 months. If Directors see a low score, they may not understand much about the detail behind it - but will worry and direct resources accordingly to improve the score. If they see a high score, they will give you a pat on the back - and it might be time to revise next year’s scorecard upwards and crank the company’s H&S targets into the next gear - perhaps ISO 45001 registration.

How to Present to the Board?

The finest way I know of presenting this dashboard to the Board is visually - e.g. by way of a radar chart. The following example shows a hypothetical chart carrying marks out of 10, (according to a spreadsheet previously agreed with the Board). At a single glance it shows the average company score (aggregated from all departments) against the agreed target. Our example shows today’s performance of 4.5 against the next target of 7.1: what next? Senior Managers now need to formulate a business plan like any other, to ensure that they hit their targets in the next 6 months - or incur the wrath of the Directors.

Avoid Nasty Press and Financial Implications of getting Health and Safety wrong

Many Boards fall into the trap of only relying on historical accident data as a KPI. This is like driving your car and only ever looking in the rear view mirror. To understand where you are going, you need to be receiving feedback from a dashboard of real-time indicators - and looking forward to where you are heading.

Contact us

Arinite clients appreciate we provide practical, no-nonsense advice about what you need to do to establish and maintain a safe and healthy working environment. Our team of health and safety consultants take pride in keeping health and safety simple. If you need to call upon our expert assistance, or just for an informal chat, please call our office 0207 947 9581 and ask to speak with Brendan Tuite, or type an enquiry to: Contact us Jan Mirkowski