Monthly Blog - You need a plan, Stan!

Health and Safety Business Planning

In last month’s blog I offered my best piece of advice, which is to offer Directors a simple numerical dashboard of key performance indicators to help them understand how well - or how badly - their company is meeting its health & safety objectives.

Dashboard

The dashboard may literally be just a series of scores out of 10 measuring for example compliance with: “Safety audit follow-up”, “Accident closure”, Fire prevention”, or whatever other measures you have agreed with the Board. If Directors see a low overall score, they may not understand much about the detail behind it - but will worry and direct resources accordingly to improve the score next time round.

A word to the wise, though: Don’t start a stampede

If a low score frightens Directors into believing that handcuffs are about to descend and incarceration is imminent, the effect may turn out to be counterproductive. You might then find Directors bombarding you with such frequent demands for progress reports, graphs, bulletins and updates on how you are protecting their interests, you will never have enough hours available to fix the underlying problems.

So, How to help Directors move the Company from today’s score to their target score in an orderly and efficient manner?

You need a plan, Stan! My second-best piece of advice is to turn aspirational wishes into a proper Business Plan, with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives. For example if your company Policy states that all employees will receive H&S training, the corresponding business plan might look something like:

Objective	Sub-set	Measure	Responsible	Target date
Health & Safety Training		All employees trained in health & safety	HR Director	Year end
	1	H&S training matrix drafted for all job grades		January
	2	H&S training matrix agreed with Leadership Team		February
	3	Tenders sent out for H&S training providers		February
	4	H&S training providers approved		April
	5	Budget obtained for H&S training course(s)		May
	6	H&S training needs agreed with staff during appraisals		June
	7	Staff booked to attend their agreed H&S training courses		June
	8	H&S training commenced		July
	9	25% agreed H&S training completed		August
	10	50% agreed H&S training completed		September
	11	75% agreed H&S training completed		October
	12	H&S training completed, records database updated		November
	13	Programme complete - ongoing for new starters		December

  (Your own company will probably have its own nomenclature - the above is only intended as an outline guide).

Director’s Roles

The role of Directors is to keep a watching brief on Business Plans like these, and to ensure that deadlines are met - or to demand a very good reason why not.  Monthly Board meetings would seem to be a suitable period. Make sure that any plan is realistic - Directors can sometimes get carried away with their own enthusiasm and forget they have other Business Plans too. Of course health & safety is important and yes, the objectives should be met forthwith, but you are where you are – Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you feel that Directors are signing up to unrealistic deadlines, you might need to temper their expectations and suggest longer timescales, rather than face the embarrassment of missed targets.

Enforcing Authorities

Even Enforcing Authorities will sometimes accept a workable Business Plan if they uncover deficiencies in your H&S management systems.  They may accept that you have acknowledged a problem, and that you have a plan with budget in place to do something about it - rather than inspectors looking to serve Improvement Notices. As for next year?  You need a fresh plan that will increment standards forward yet again!

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, or type an enquiry to https://www.arinite.com/contact-us/.