Introduction
Senior management in companies with successful health and safety programs select ultimate responsibility and initiative to ensure that workplace safety is entranced in all activities of the company.
Management involvement as a contributor to a successful occupational health and safety program takes on a number of dimensions. These dimensions include visible felt leadership, cultural alignment within organisations, appointments and responsibilities, resource allocation, setting of objectives and targets and compliance.
Visible Felt Leadership
The concept of visible felt leadership is the foundation of many successful world class organizations. The basic principles are management that is seen to be involved in the day to day activities of the workers. This activity is a means by which the managers in the organisation influence the attitude and behaviour of the company. It is this behaviour that will influence the success of the health and safety management systems in the company. Leading by example is an well-known component of a successful safety management program. The commitment and conformance to rules and regulations forms the basis of any safety management program. Management can not be exempted from compliance to any safety requirement in the organisation. Visible and continuous management compliance and involvement to the requirements of the safety management standards is a critical success factor. The involvement of employees in decision making can be effected by eliciting potential solution form employees before principal decisions are made. This will not only create visible management involvement, but will ensure that employees will prefer ownership of the decisions when they have to implement it. In addition to this involving a vertical reduce of employees in the risk assessment process is a basic requirement for the success of this significant part of the safety management system.
Cultural Alignment within Organisation
The health and safety policy of the organisation forms the basis of setting the basic framework for ensuring that cultural alignment in the organisation can take place successfully. It is important that the policy is issued and communicated at all levels of the organization. The commitment of the Chief Executive Officer must be reflected in the content of the policy as this determines the organisational climate. The organisational climate forms the basis for the formulation of the values sets within the organization. The alignment of the commitment to the safety and health of the management team with that of the employees and other stakeholders will only be possible with consistent and continuous management involvement in the safety management system of an organisation. This should be reflected in the policy.
The training of managers and employees regarding the risk profile of the company and the hazards associated with their work can be utilised as an effective tool to align the cultural alignment within the organisation. Training and awareness programs should include focussed training of management, supervisors, safety representatives and other workers about their individual roles in the safety management system and how non conformance in one dwelling can influence the effectiveness of the rest of the safety management .system.
Appointments and Responsibilities
In order to ensure that it is possible and probable for managers to be actively involved in the day to day activities of a safety management program a certain number of vital appointments must be made where line managers are responsible for specific safety activities.
In order to facilitate this, the organizational management structures should be so designed that it will be possible to allocate these duties in a practical manner to line managers. The appointments should clearly allocate duties and responsibilities stating the scope, duties and authority towards the safety management program. It is critical that the expected outcomes of the activities are contained in targets and objectives of each individual. Performance appraisals should be utilised to hold management accountable for accomplishment of specific health and safety targets and objectives in predetermined timescales.
Resource Allocation
It is a fact that the introduction of a safety system will require the allocation of a number of scarce resources to this function. The justification of this allocation should be done by conducting a cost benefit analysis based on financial and non financial factors. The safety management system requires a wide variety of resources that needs to be effectively allocated and sustained for the organization to obtain continuous improvement of its efforts. If it is clear to all the alive to and affected parties in the organisation that the allocation of these resources adds value to their specific activities and this value can be quantified or justified in financial and non financial terms the safety management program will have a significantly bigger chance of being successful.
Setting of Objectives and Targets
In any successful management system the setting of effective objectives and targets forms the basis of the success. The setting of goals and targets create a current focus provided that all the role-players take ownership of the objectives and targets. This can normally by achieved by meaningful involvement of the role-players in setting the objectives and targets. An effective goal setting guidelines is that goals must be SMART goals. What this Intelligent goal setting acronym actually means is that the safety goals in the organization should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Task orientated.
Efforts without goals and targets do not position direction, therefore the safety management program should describe a system how these are determined and communicated effectively to all employees in the organisation.
Compliance
In most countries of the world it is generally accepted that once a safety rule is made it should be complied with. A significant problem that commonly occurs in the industrial environment is that non conformance to safety rules are not freely reported. This lack of reporting can be attributed to a number of factors, however a large portion of the under reporting is as a result of the blame fixing culture associated with the safety environment. In order to improve reporting of deviations and not conforming, a blame free environment should be created. This can only be achieved by full participation and involvement of all levels of management. By creating a blame free environment, employees will feel free to report risks and hazards identified in their own work environment. In order to demonstrate the importance management attribute to these reports, all the report received should be investigated as soon as possible to settle the fundamental contributing factors. The purpose of the investigation must be to determine the action that must be taken to hold or prevent the hazards from occurring in future and not to identify a culprit.
Conclusion
Most best-practice studies agree that strong executive leadership as a contributing factor to successful health and safety performance is based on management involvement and support at all levels on the organization.
By its very nature, management involvement that cuts across organizational boundaries, such as is the case with health and safety management, is a complex and delicate business that needs care and attention to achieve success.
Health and Safety program success can become an issue unless there is strong, effective senior management support and a shared vision. To achieve this, the health and safety program decision makers should be from the senior management team and should be required to justify the targets and objectives based on performance-based evaluation methods. Creating buy in from senior management in such a manner that it will result in visible felt leadership by the workforce are essential to the successful implementation of a health and safety program.
© Carl Marx
