This insight has been provided by Robin Maunder-Cockram the Health & Safety Management Expert at EY CertifyPoint. It is a practical explanation of ISO 45001 Clause 5.1: Leadership & Commitment.
Either by changing conditions or behaviours, risks won’t leave your organization without change. This simple truth comes with a serious challenge only a few leaders truly manage to overcome.
This article is about H&S leadership, the challenges which need to be taken to accomplish durable change in favor of H&S and the handholds we found while working with our clients. In this blog on ISO 45001, you will find reference to key behavioural concepts required to fulfil the requirements of the standard. But before we look into those, I would like to first address the importance of leadership to collective behaviour.
Leadership and Safety Culture
Safety Culture combines two aspects: Safety, and Culture. The latter, culture, refers to collective behaviour of a group of people. Culture is the sum of values and norms which this group of people uses to distinguish good from bad and by extension to decide on how to behave. A value is part of a culture when the majority of the group uses it to shape their behaviour and confront those not adhering to the value. Safety is an example of a value.
Safety is the absence of risks. Or in more practical terms; the extent in which incidents are prevented by proper control of risks. Hence, a safety culture is a term best defined as; a situation in which the majority of the workforce has embraced health and safety as key-values which they use to decide on how to behave at work, as indicated by the behaviour shown when people are exposed to risks or H&S information.
The maturity of a safety culture refers to the position of health and safety in the list of values people act upon. Do they abandon safety when the operational KPIs are at risk? Or is safety only important when the manager is around? Developing maturity takes time and requires top and operational leadership which reward desired behaviour actively while consistently imposing consequences for unsafe acts and conditions. But most importantly, leadership and management need to know what makes their teams tick. Understand what people find important and why before you help them embrace what you think is important.
The rule of thumb to safety culture: Understand before demanding understanding.
The focus of your organization can be used to get a feel of your organization’s cultural maturity:
- Excellent: – Focus on external best-practice
- Proactive – Focus on Risks
- Standardized – Focus on Procedures and Rules
- Reactive – Focus on Incidents
- Passive – Focus on Legislation and Compliance
During our engagements, we have had the opportunity to define where our clients are with regards to culture. These measurements led us to the understanding that leadership has a key role to play in shaping the decision making process of people, which uses norms and values to determine what to do and how to react. Whenever somebody acts in conflict with what is collectively accepted behaviour (e.g. culture), that person is most likely asked to stop and behave differently (if such confrontation is perceived culturally acceptable). Moreover, most of us want to be socially accepted by those around us. This is why we are more likely to copy the behaviour of our surroundings or why (un)safe behaviour tends to spread like an oil spill.
Leaders, both formal and informal, have the power to challenge norms and values based on their social credits or position in the organization because these allow them to impose consequences and reward. This comes down to the conditioning of behaviour as part of which working towards required changes or working safely is rewarded and the alternative is consistently responded to with consequences. This dynamic is applicable on both the change process which is required to implement a management system and on a more operational level for the development of safe behaviour. For the purpose of this blog, we will focus on strategic leadership and address operational leadership.
Leading Health and Safety
Inspired by Jules Evans, Daniel Kahneman, John P. Kotter & ISO 45001
The human brain is constantly looking to save energy. It does this by learning from past experiences and building routines to reduce the amount of active thinking. This prevents the brain from thinking all the time, saving energy in the process. It simply transfers activity from its active smart parts that cost a lot of energy to its passive, lazy routine-oriented parts as soon as possible. Only when an unprecedented situation occurs, and routines can’t be applied, (or with significant training in rational thinking) does the brain switchback. This is the essence of the dual brain theory for which Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize. It gives us an explanation as to why change is such a hard thing to accomplish, certainly amongst groups of people. So if health and safety requires changes, top managers will need to battle the forces of the human brain itself.
Mobilize Your Movement
A good first step is to get people’s attention. Top management can do this by setting health and safety targets so high that they can’t be reached by conducting business as usual. The key is to make people feel just a little uncomfortable with the current state by connecting their interests to health and safety performance (rewards & benefit programs for example). The second part of this step is to feed the attention obtained by moving a flow of information through the company that can fuel discussions and provide relevant facts proving the need for change. Possibly most important: prevent any type of political correctness on the current state. Instead, use all communication channels thinkable to make people realize that we are going to do things differently and this is how that impacts you. This resonates well with elements E and H of the standard. As a rule of thumb here: happy talk destroys momentum.
Provide Direction Together
With people aware of the issue, the question “so what are we going to do?” will come. By the time that question comes, you will need to have an answer to keep your momentum. The answer should be a direction and developing that will require a team of interested parties with whom you develop a policy, objectives and a strategy. These will need to provide an answer to contextual influences, add value to needs and expectations and compliments the overall business plan, which means that it cannot conflict with any other objective being communicated to middle management (5.1 B).
This is also the first step in ensuring actual integration of safety elements into business processes (5.1 C). The team should ideally have sufficient authority, influence and respect to challenge current routines as this is an essential counter-balance to inertia. As long as your team inspires people, they will not be tempted to move back to what they are used to. Drafting the policy, objectives and strategy can be done by one individual as long as the entire team has been included in its review and establishment.
Communicate and Motivate Action
When approved by the team, the policy, strategy and objectives needs to be communicated (5.1 E) and resources allocated. (5.1 D) All members of the team, all top managers and their subordinates should explain why H&S is important during meetings, e-mails and presentations (5.1 G). Repetition combined with a clear, consistent explanation why realizing the H&S policy is relevant to the audience (not in general) is the key to success. Secondly, the team and all top managers need to actively provide leadership by being present on the shop floor, showing safe behavior and challenging unsafe conditions and behaviors consistently.
Ask a random person at any level of the company about the number one priority within the company and they should reply: “health and safety”. So keep on going until they do.
Safeguard momentum and Overcome Obstacles
When communication has mobilized people and the first parts of your strategy are being executed, momentum is very fragile. Obstacles along the way may reduce your efforts
to a stand-still. Actively identifying and removing these is an essential part in ensuring that your management system can perform. During our sessions with C-level and H&S Directors we often identify the following challenges:
- Health & Safety objectives conflict with other (operational) business objectives
- The Health & Safety strategy is not aligned with contextual influences of the organization
- Middle management lacks the capability to drive the actions associated with the strategy
- People at key positions continue to resist the changes to be made (actively or passively)
In most cases, the organization lacks sufficient reliable information on these challenges to make well-informed decisions. In other cases, it’s old systems and structures, including ways of work which keep these challenges alive. Whatever the reason, these need to be adjusted or removed. This also proofs that information should be appreciated as a very important resource. In our experience, many organizations struggle with getting quality data which allows them to see what the real risks or performance opportunities are, while this is essential in ensuring the objectives are met (5.1 F).
Manage Clutter and Empower People
Top management is required to empower people to take their responsibilities on H&S, try new things, make mistakes and learn to understand the new way of work (5.1 G&J). A tangible way of doing that is to be present on the shop floor and to be periodically involved in safety committee meetings (5.1 M). Ask people for feedback and promote the actions taken upon that feedback.
Challenge their performance and break down their obstacles then and there (5.1 L). A very explicit obstacle mentioned by ISO 45001 is reprisals when reporting incidents, hazards, risks and opportunities on health and safety. Needless to say, anyone posing such reprisals needs to be dealt with swiftly (5.1 K). Leadership training can be an important element required to sustain the change.
Certainly if the level of management with direct impact on health and safety is incapable of challenging unsafe behaviors effectively (5.1 G).
Maintain Focus and Keep People Engaged
With actions taken, strategy progressing and obstacles being torn down, the road towards realizing your policy seems straight forward. But now that people have taken action, they may call it a day. People may get the feeling that they have done their part and move back to their routines. Counteracting this requires short-term wins that give new meaning to people involved in the process (5.1 G). One way of doing this is by incorporating quick-wins in annual plans and promoting the realization of these actively (5.1 E). By doing so, more people are attracted to health and safety as it seems to be a winning team (5.1 H). With more people involved, achievements to come become exponentially more plausible and the likelihood of additional people joining is higher.
Eventually, this should lead to a positive spiral of H&S improvements where tiny steps are made towards the realization of your objectives. But again, don’t over appreciate anything when this is achieved. Combine every signal of progress with a request for more (5.1 H).
Consolidate and Determine Next Steps
H&S becomes sufficiently credible to start changing other structures in the benefit of safety when roughly 2/3 of the company is involved in the change. H&S can then be used as an argument to challenge old workplaces, methods, systems, structures, policies, procedures and instructions that don’t fit well with the H&S policy (5.1 C). Some people will have a problem adjusting to the new way of working. Which is why leadership now needs to support people in their new role (5.1 G). A lot of time might have passed since the policy, objectives and strategy where presented so it might be time for review to see if these are still relevant to the context and needs and expectations of your interested parties (5.1 H&B). Slight changes to the process like adding new programs and change agents or changing themes (from focus on the top three risks to mitigating four to six) will give new impulse to health and safety and prevent it from becoming a number that’s repeated too many times.
The final step in the leadership cycle is to promote the new way of work with improved health and safety or even business performance. Give people the proof of concept. Top management needs to ensure the improvements made are measured and their causation can be linked to safe conditions and behaviors (5.1 H). Most importantly, top management needs to remove unnecessary interdependencies for H&S growth (such as approval flows etc.), (5.1 G) ensure people are properly trained (5.1 D) to handle new and old delegated H&S responsibilities and establish information systems that help indicate changes in H&S performance to responsible managers (5.1 D).
Evaluation
The above is written by applying the book: Leading Change by John P. Kotter – 2012 | ISBN: 978-1-4221-8643-5 to the requirements listed in ISO 45001. I have combined these two works to create a high-level example of the various challenges which leaders may run into when trying to change the business in the benefit of H&S. In my personal experience I often see that workers overestimate leadership in the sense that they assume leadership oversees all, knows all and that the current state is de facto a product of conscious decisions made by leadership. The leaders I have worked with are exceptionally capable and knowledgeable individuals, but human. Leaders have to deal with a lot at the same time and partly rely on others to keep them informed and engaged in the subjects they needs to lead. With that being said, I hope this blog provides a glance in the world of H&S leadership that supports a little more understanding for the position of H&S Leaders.
On a more technical note, the requirements listed in Clause 5.1 have been set up very general in pursuing wide applicability of the standard. The content is good but there is a certain sequence in which top management should involve itself in health and safety, as I tried to explain by applying Kotter’s work to ISO 45001. Moreover in many cases, its middle management that has the biggest impact on health and safety which is why they should obtain sufficient autonomy to make the right decisions. This is a challenge not so much considered in the standard while essential for success.
