Site visits

• Only half the organisations in the survey have all board members going on site visits and among the leading boards, only 2/3 go on site visits.
• I remember when I took the Foundations of Directorship course provided by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and they asked the aspiring directors in the room whether they thought it was their ‘place’ to go out and have a look at what was happening at the coal face. Most of those in the room said ‘No’; although they supported management doing so. It is important for directors and executives to conduct site visits, and have genuine conversations with workers on their health and safety. Senior leaders need to lead by example and it’s a great opportunity for senior leaders to get an appreciation of the health & safety risks in their business – after all, this is an obligation in the WHS Act.

Culture is a result of the climate

• Nine out of 10 CEOs believe their programmes for involving workers in health and safety are effective; however, they identified culture/worker attitudes as one of the main barriers to improving health and safety and worker participation ranked 6th last in a list of health and safety-related topics discussed by boards. Only a quarter of those who responded ran specific ‘culture change’ initiatives and less than a third ran dedicated health and safety culture surveys.
• If culture is your biggest challenge, you need to take a look at your organisational climate. The difference between culture & climate is a discussion for a different blog post, but for this post, I want to stress that if you want to see a change in the behaviour of those at the coal face, you need to look at the organisational climate. For example, consider what you, as a senior leader, monitor, measure, reward – essentially, what you pay attention to. If it doesn’t involve putting health & safety first or ensuring that health & safety is core to organisational decision making, then it’s unlikely that you will see the progress you are wanting in terms of a culture of safety. And this means, you are not capitalising on how to leverage health & safety as key driver to improving your bottom line. In fact, much research has gone into the business case for safety, and the key findings are that investing in safety has direct and indirect links to your business performance. On a side note, more than half of the survey respondents said that investing in health & safety boosted their productivity.
• Look at the leadership training provided to your executive and board. Only 1 in 5 CEO survey respondents mentioned improving leadership among the key health & safety initiatives they are undertaking; however, leadership is fundamental to creating the climate you want and driving a culture of safety.
• Get a baseline assessment of your health & safety culture and then work on the changes to your climate that will improve your culture. If you don’t have a baseline assessment, how are you to measure your improvement in the culture and then celebrate your success when you do make improvements? A word of caution: I have seen plenty of examples where businesses do not use an evidence-based model to measure their health & safety culture or identify what a ‘successful’ health & safety culture looks like before putting together their survey questions. If you don’t invest in the time to understand what is required to improve the culture, then are the answers to your survey questions really going to tell you how to make genuine, long-term improvements to your health and safety culture?

Thanks for reading!