If you operate in multiple jurisdictions, you have to consider more than just different legal requirements for health and safety. Are all your EHS protocols translated into the local language? Have you accounted for cultural and geopolitical sensitivities and how they affect work? What if your employee demographics differ wildly between sites – should this change your approach to health and safety?
You will need more than a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
This was the topic of the final instalment of our ‘Safety Briefing’ webinar series. In ‘Mastering EHS: strategies for scaling safety and compliance across complex, distributed workplaces’ our expert panel explored the ways that businesses can scale their EHS protocols and systems across growing workforces and sites.
Heading up our panel was Duncan Spencer, Head of Advice and Practice at the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). Duncan’s career as a health and safety professional and consultant has spanned 35 years and a diverse range of industries, including defense, manufacturing, logistics and agriculture. In his current role Duncan manages IOSH’s academic research function.
Joining Duncan on the panel was Jeff Marston, Global Head of Safety and Environment for AB Agri, a global leader in animal feed manufacturing. AB Agri employs 3000 people worldwide across 77 sites with operations in China, Poland, Denmark, Czechia, Finland, the USA as well as the UK and Ireland.
The panel was completed by Darren Smith, Senior Presales Consultant with EcoOnline. For the past 14 years Darren has specialized in the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) software space.
In this blog post we will go through the key takeaways of the webinar, read on or jump to the sections below:
- What are you trying to achieve? – Setting realistic goals
- Understanding safety maturity on a widescale
- Client experience – AB Agri
- Streamlining worker safety and participation
What are you trying to achieve? – Setting realistic goals
According to Duncan, the first issue many organizations face when trying to implement change across multiple sites is that they don’t clearly define what they are trying to achieve. Here, it's helpful to remember the S.M.A.R.T mnemonic device (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely).
“How you engage the board in the first place in terms of where you are trying to go and what you’re trying to achieve is really important. You’ve got to set that mission statement.” – Duncan Spencer
The mission statement that you bring to the board should not be overly large or nebulous. If goals are set so high that resources become stretched, what is the likelihood that they will be achievable?
This is illustrated in the following example. Say you are a business involved in retail and distribution and your proposed mission statement is to be the worldwide leader in warehouse safety for employees. This is a fine aspiration, but it is not an achievable goal.
You must be able to show the board the small step objectives that will take you there, year on year. For example, this year you might commit to a full audit of docking bays in every site to gain a complete understanding of risk. Next year will be spent implementing control measures, with a goal of reducing incidents by 50%. With this, you now have tangible goals.
At this stage, you should also decide on the boundaries. What will you be excluding? This can help you to manage project creep.
Making your goals align with the rest of the business
According to Duncan, health and safety needs to be in alignment with and integrated into the rest of the functions of the organization.
How can you do this?
- Understand the operational aims of the organization: you need to be able to show how occupational safety supports these aims.
- Avoid the technical language of health and safety. Use the language of others in the value chain of the business. Articulate your project in their terms.
- Understand how to measure your efforts.
Where are you starting from – and where are you going
In the clip below, Duncan goes into detail on where organizations usually fall down when it comes to measuring the success of their EHS goals:
Understanding safety maturity on a wider scale
“It doesn’t matter what organization you are, whether you are in the same country zone or multiple country zones, every site will have a different level of maturity when it comes to occupational safety and health management to others.” – Duncan Spencer
It’s highly unlikely that all sites in an organization will have the same level of safety maturity.
There are many variables that will affect the safety maturity of a site:
- Legislative framework in the area
- Social/ cultural issues
- Morale issues among the workforce
- Local leadership issues
- Personnel changes
- Volume of work at the site
- Many more!
The IOSH model for safety maturity
The image below illustrates IOSH’s model for ascertaining the safety maturity journey of an organization:
Image © IOSH
At the early stages, many organizations (understandably) become preoccupied with compliance with legislation. However, this can cause a problem if they have multiple locations. What standards will the organization comply with?
As you progress to the middle of the maturity model, management systems become more important. At the later stages, human factors and behaviors come to the fore.
You need to know what stage every site is at in the maturity model, and then give them appropriate actions so that they can progress upwards.
Client experience – AB Agri
Our next panellist was Jeff Marston, Global Head of Safety and Environment for AB Agri. AB Agri consists of 86 reporting units and just over 3200 staff located internationally. Jeff outlined some of the challenges they faced:
- Working across multiple languages and cultures
- Multiple IT systems in use
- No on-site specialists
- COVID and travel restrictions
- Increase in reporting requirements internationally
- Increased performance expectations
- Different market sectors
- Veteran knowledge/ staff turnover
- Low cost of compliance – difficult to justify investment
- Changing regulatory environment
- Changing stakeholder expectations
Watch the clip below to find out how AB Agri approached the above challenges:
How AB Agri use EcoOnline for data capture
Jeff also detailed how AB Agri utilizes EcoOnlines reporting tools to capture safety information from all locations. Firstly, data had to be captured simply and efficiently. It was vital that there be one single source of truth for data collected across the sites. Incident and near miss reporting is done the same way in all locations, and all reporting is made available in local languages.
Workers can scan QR codes on factory floors to report incidents which are then logged directly into the health and safety and maintenance systems.
The data is used for statutory as well as internal reporting, greatly minimizing the admin burden. All of the data sources are documented, providing continuity.
Streamlining worker safety and participation
Finally, EcoOnline’s Darren Smith looked at the importance of streamlining worker safety and participation, and how our EHS software helps businesses reinforce a positive safety culture.
Darren reaffirmed Duncan's earlier statement that it is best to start simple with your goals, as they can always be added to later:
“Having many different ideas, and to have to implement all of those things at the same time, introduces complexity and potential confusion when you are rolling these out.” - Darren Smith
The webinar finished with a Q&A session from the attendees, one question that appeared multiple times was whether it was possible for work sites to regress in the safety maturity model.
According to Duncan, the answer is yes – new legislation, a change in management, a major incident in the industry are just some of the variables that can push organizations backwards. To mitigate this, good change management is vital.
The EcoOnline suite of EHS tools is on hand to help you manage risk, incident reporting and auditing across your entire business. Our action tracking and strong multi-lingual capabilities help you avoid some of the challenges raised in this webinar.
Want to watch the webinar in full? Click the link below
