IIRSM Blog

This year’s IIRSM conference in association with
Health and Safety at Work aims to focus on health and safety in the context of
wider business risk management. The reason is simply that placing safety
management in that bigger picture is the next step for a profession looking to
integrate itself more closely into the way organisations are run.

For safety practitioners, doing a job to the best of
their ability can legitimately seem to be all about discharging their moral duty
to make sure no one is hurt in the pursuit of profit and protecting the
organisation from prosecution.

But in my experience, safety directors in the
biggest corporations don’t frame their priorities in terms of avoiding
enforcement action. Instead, they talk in terms of meeting corporate
objectives, whether it is providing excellent customer service or optimising
production quality and quantity. Maintaining a safe workforce, free from
accidents with all the downtime and distraction that comes with them, meshes
neatly with the larger organisational aims. It also helps protect the corporate
image, that other overarching risk concern of big business.

Safety heads know that they get more traction in
aligning themselves with those organisation-specific risk concerns (though the
claim of most mission statements to be homegrown is belied by how similar many
of them sound from one corporation to another – perhaps there are only a
certain number of things you can aim to be excellent at after all). In
industries such as oil and gas and construction, the safety imperative is often
explicit in corporate goals but that is because those industries have had long
and bitter experience of how easily they can get turned away from their aims by
understating the importance of minimising accidents.

Regulatory compliance and the moral imperative don’t
evaporate as objectives when the safety team talks in terms of organisational
priorities and risk control; they should be more than satisfied as a result of
meeting goals which set the bar even higher. After all, a slip accident in a
supermarket may not attract enforcement action, but it still does nothing to
improve the shopping experience of the customers who witness it.

Familiarity with your organisation’s risk management
objectives and fitting your work into them objectives does nothing to affect
the fundamentals of safety management, it’s about the way the work is
interpreted (in the sense that one language is interpreted into another) to
match the organisational culture.

This year’s IIRSM and HSW annual conference will be
held on 14 November.

Louis Wustemann, Managing Editor, LexisNexis