Driving Efficiency and Effectiveness in Health & Safety Organizations
Health & safety organizations that serve complex plant and field operations face increasingly difficult challenges to their mission. Economic conditions have caused budget cutbacks and diminished staffing resources for H&S support functions, even as senior management seeks to improve workplace injury rates and other safety related metrics that cause productivity losses. H&S managers seek to improve their structures, designation of roles and responsibilities and to craft training so that their operations delivery strong safety performance within tight budget restraints. This Best Practices Benchmarking Report provides H&S managers with specific examples, more than 180 metrics and recommendations on how to identify and close performance gaps not only to performance metrics but also to processes and best practices.
Business Operations > Health and Safety d
Industries Profiled:
Pharmaceutical; Consumer Products; Diagnostic; Manufacturing; Energy; Utilities
Companies Profiled:
Bayer; Siemens VDO Automotive; Corning; Duke Energy; CenterPoint Energy; Peoples Energy Corporation; Southern Company; PPL Global; Bell Helicopter; Bechtel; Progress Energy; AEP; Eli Lilly
Study Snapshot
Driving Efficiency and Effectiveness in Health & Safety Organizations (OP-96) examines how the most successful H&S organizations have reduced or contained costs while maintaining an effective safety function. This report documents how leading H&S organizations among utilities and other companies deal with similar safety challenges and identify the ideal structure, staffing level and allocation of tasks to optimize their H&S organizations and performances. By studying these companies’ practices, your company will gain the necessary information to conduct a performance gap analysis, identify potential areas for improvement, and then close performance gaps in the performance of your Health & Safety organization and operations.
After reading this report, you will gain insight into how to structure Health & Safety organization and reporting lines, develop a comprehensive process for designating roles and responsibilities, and design a training program that will effectively communicate safety tasks to line management and personnel. This study also includes the perspectives of interviewed and surveyed H&S managers, such as which organizational models have proved most effective and what tactics are most useful for gaining cooperation from line management for new safety initiatives.
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Key Findings
A select few H&S organizations demonstrate very high levels of efficiency compared to the rest of the benchmark class due to prudent delegation of tasks.
Among the H&S organizations that participated in benchmark interviews, two stood out with superior efficiency measurements of "Ratio of H&S Staff to Total Employees Served." These companies take common steps to achieve efficiencies, such as a broad level of geographic responsibility assigned to field H&S staff. These and other tactics help ensure a thoroughly efficient Health & Safety organization.
Demanding work hours contribute to the risk of burnout, costly turnover and diminished oversight of H&S staff.
Several interviewed H&S organizations face the prospect of burnout and increased turnover due to very high workloads. This may lead to a loss of institutional knowledge and productivity that replacements simply cannot make up for. Companies that see overtime as dominant personnel management issues should consider it a warning sign to be carefully evaluated.
Efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved by instilling safety as an inextricable part of the performance of one's job tasks.
A key practice in successfully pushing H&S tasks to the line personnel involves tightly ingraining a safety mindset in all hands. Worker selection, job definition, process description and co-worker oversight all must have safety as a tightly woven element -- something that cannot be circumvented or delegated to another person. Fostering individual responsibility for safety enables the H&S professional to become a subject matter expert, serving as a reference point as needed by the line workers and management.
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