The Real Business Impact of Health & Safety

6th December 2017

That’s right – a staggering 80% increase in fines.

So how do you minimise the potential harm to your employees, ensure your organisation isn’t hit by a big fine and avoid a custodial sentence?

In the second post, I looked at 10 factors to consider when creating a better approach to health and safety through effective and visible leadership.

Following the publication of these figures, I thought it worth re-publishing these:

1. Accountability: Establish business leadership team’s accountability for health and safety – the most important and demanding change.
2. Challenge: Gain access to high calibre health and safety resource – if you want the best advice, get the best people.
3. Responsibility: Clearly delegate responsibility to line management to implement risk controls – what you really want, they will really deliver.
4. Motivate: Engage with the whole workforce and supply chain and reward success. Everybody must agree what’s important and be pulling together.
5. Resource: Identify the risks your activities generate and create a plan of risk controls to eliminate or mitigate them – allocate resources to design, implement and review.
6. Change Management: Create a realistic plan outlining the change you want and how quickly it can occur. Consider the complete burden of investment and change currently impacting on the business.
7. Control: Regularly monitor to ensure risk controls are in place and effective – don’t simply hope the controls work; you wouldn’t for sales or margin.
8. Review: Learn from your mistakes – evaluate the potential of all events and make investigations proportionate to what could have happened.
9. Growth: Actively seek opportunities to improve – don’t narrowly achieve compliance, you wouldn’t with a financial investment
10. Competency: Competency is essential throughout your organisation and supply chain – experience, knowledge and soft skills are all essential.

This might look daunting, but once all these factors have been considered and you have started to lead a culture of responsibility, not just in safety, but across the whole business, the benefits won’t just be financial. And we can help get you there.