A strategy for success

In the first of a series of six articles on health and safety, Chris Hudson outlines a few practical steps to develop an effective health and safety management system at work

Most employers' and senior managers' time is taken up by decisions on the best way forward for their businesses. They generally do this either formally or informally, with reference to an overall strategy or plan. What successful businesses do not do however, is respond only to external influences.

Successful companies are proactive in their business planning rather than reactive. Businesses that rely on a reactive approach tend not to last because it is only a matter of time before events overtake them and they reach a point where they cannot deal with the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Any half-decent business strategy will set out the overall aims and objectives for the business, and identify the key strategic functions that must be dealt with in order to achieve them.

Finance, purchasing, production, and distribution are just a few examples of these functions. Most senior managers would recognise these functions and would accept the need to address them as critical business issues.

Successful businesses have plans that incorporate them into one whole strategy that sets out performance indicators against which progress can be measured. They understand the old adage - "what gets measured gets done!"

The question is how can these methods be rolled out to other organisations, large and small, so that they can reap the same benefits of systematic management? It would be useful if there were a ready-made "framework for managing" that managers could use. Of course, such things do exist as anyone familiar with quality management, for example would know.

They will have seen how quality circles are one way of developing a cycle for continuous improvement in the production and/or supply of goods and services.

Japanese methods for systematic management and production that were so successful during the Eighties and early Nineties are further examples of the potential that proactive management methods offer. The benefits are not just available to large organisations however. Small companies can also effectively use systematic methods; it is simply that their systems will be far less complex than those of their bigger brothers!

So what has all this to do with health and safety at work? Firstly, effective health and safety management can make a major contribution to the profitability of any organisation. Working safely for example, correlates directly with efficiency, productivity, and the avoidance of losses and waste.

Health and safety must therefore be considered a strategic function alongside those of finance, purchasing and distribution. In other words, it is something that must be "managed" and incorporated into the overall business strategy. Systematic management is therefore just as important in health and safety as it is elsewhere, and this means that we need a "system" to work with.

Fortunately, we do not have to keep "reinventing the wheel" here because such systems already exist; all we have to do is tailor them to our own needs.

In its book Successful Health and Safety Management, the UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommends a five-stage management system. This system has been adopted throughout industry and commerce because it is effective in any kind of business and is also compatible with the ISO 18001 standard.

Its great strength lies in its simplicity and its usefulness to companies regardless of their size and the nature of their business. The system can be adapted to suit particular circumstances, and so the exact form and degree of complexity will vary from company to company.

Essentially, it provides the right framework which can help reassure companies that they are dealing with all the issues that confront them.

The system works like this: firstly we decide on what it is that we want to achieve, for example "that accidents and ill health will be reduced to the lowest level possible, and below the national level for our business sector".

We then develop roles and responsibilities for staff so that they can contribute to the delivery of overall aims and objectives. This might mean that some staff could require training in order to perform the roles assigned to them.

Next we decide what practical measures have to be taken to achieve success, and in health and safety, risk assessment is one of the principal methods used to do this. We then proceed to implement the actions we have identified as being necessary.

We might, for example, implement a new work method, or begin to actually use any safeguards that were introduced. Now that things are beginning to happen there has to be a process for monitoring the success of our efforts and the contribution we are making to the achievement of overall policy aims.

Monitoring might include such things as checking noise levels, health surveillance, and examining accident statistics in our companies. Finally, rather than simply plough on regardless of whether or not we are succeeding, we must pause to review our experiences and make some judgments about the suitability of the measures we have developed - did our great ideas work?

Taking this a stage further, we can then carry out a full audit of the management system, asking ourselves some searching questions about our effectiveness at each stage.

The results will enable us to reassess our policies if necessary, and move around the circle again, which over time will become a mechanism for continual improvement.

Mr Hudson is a senior lecturer in occupational health and safety management at the University of Portsmouth and consultant to the Institute of Health and Safety in Msida.

chris.hudson@port.ac.uk