FEATURE
RAISING THE STANDARD
Mike Wood, Product & Technology Director, Constructionline & Acclaim advises businesses on how to accurately measure and improve their organisational safety culture.
When it comes to ensuring their health and safety processes are meeting best practice guidelines, many businesses turn to ISO as the benchmark standard. That’s why several safety-conscious companies will be striving to meet the requirements of the new organisational safety standard, ISO 45001, which was introduced in March 2018. While ISO 45001 is not itself a legal requirement, proportionate adoption of a health and safety management system standard can help businesses measure, evaluate and, ultimately, manage health and safety performance in a structured way.
Any reputable business will work hard to ensure that their safety standards are high, and that the health and wellbeing of their staff is protected. But the reality is that accidents and illnesses still occur in the workplace every day – in 2016/17, 137 people were killed at work, while over 609,000 workers suffered non-fatal injuries as a result of work activity.
Some of the most common causes of workplace accidents are slips, trips and falls, lifting and handling and being struck by an object – all areas that are typically covered in workers’ health and safety training. Assuming that the majority of these accidents will have occurred within organisations that have clear health and safety policies in place, it seems that there’s a crucial gap between health and safety procedures being known and understood by workers, and workers actually adhering to them. This gap has been recognised within the ISO 45001 requirements, which places a much greater emphasis on demonstrating regular and sustained employee engagement as a means of improving safety culture.
MEASURING CULTURE Whilst health and safety KPIs and policies are important, a focus on statistics alone isn’t enough to significantly reduce the number of accidents and near misses. To truly drive improvements, it’s vital to get under the skin of employee attitudes towards safety. The reason for this is simple. To effect change, it is vital that employees have safety principles ingrained in their day-to-day actions. Whether that’s simple steps, such as putting lids on hot drinks and wearing high visibility clothing, or following critical procedures for operating heavy machinery, simply publishing and communicating a policy isn’t enough – workers need to feel it.
Taking steps to improve engagement will positively impact your safety culture. However, as culture is
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an intangible thing, monitoring it and reporting on the success of your efforts to improve it can be a challenge. The most straightforward way to measure your company’s culture is by talking to your employees themselves. But when it comes to turning your employees’ views and opinions into a trackable metric, you may find that tools like the Health and Safety Executive’s Safety Climate Tool (SCT) are invaluable.
The SCT measures the safety climate of an organisation across eight key factors that have been researched and proven to be associated with organisational safety culture. Developed and refined by HSE’s scientists over the past decade, the survey-based product works by analysing the perceptions and attitudes of an organisation’s employees towards health and safety. Respondent data can be grouped to help identify those areas where more action might be needed to reinforce policies or encourage greater engagement.
The output report generates a ‘score’ for each factor to give you that all-important trackable metric, which acts as a leading KPI indicator. It is straightforward to benchmark performance against that of other companies, providing some context, so you can assess your results within your peer group.
As the way we work is constantly changing, there will always be new challenges facing health and safety professionals across industries, but fostering a positive safety culture should help organisations to ensure improved safety for their workers, now and in the future.
Constructionline is the approved reseller of Safety Climate Tool in the UK.
www.constructionline.co.uk www.tomorrowshs.com
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