Why HR Should Facilitate A Health And Safety Culture

Protecting employees from injury and ill-health can impact the bottom line

I was recently asked the question: “What does protecting people at work from injury and ill-health have to do with HR?” My answer was ‘productivity’!
 
Now that may be a surprising word for someone who works for NEBOSH to use. After all, we are a charitable organization with a vision to preserve and improve health, safety, and the environment in workplaces worldwide. Perhaps, you thought I would talk about the moral prerequisite of protecting your fellow employees from injury and harm?

 

Of course, we all have a moral obligation to protect our work colleagues and this topic will have been covered by many other authors. But to make the case for HR professionals involving themselves more in health, safety and well-being, I wanted to explore this from a business performance perspective.
 
Under the broad remit of HR comes a responsibility for contributing to – and helping to maximize – the productivity of an organization by optimizing the effectiveness of employees. Their physical and mental well-being is crucial to creating an engaged, motivated and able workforce.
 
Recent analysis carried out by the Centre of Economic and Business Research revealed that workplace absence costs the UK economy £18bn in lost productivity. As well as injuries at work, a significant contributor to increased levels of absence in the UK has been the rise in mental health issues, which have increased by 71.9% since 2011.
 
The analysis also showed that a physical ill-health was also a major absence issue. For example, musculoskeletal problems affect mostly 50-60-year-olds, with time off to recover from surgery resulting in 0.84 days lost per employee – the equivalent of over two years of lost productivity for an organization employing 1,000 people.
 
Overall, the report concluded that a reduction of just over 20% in UK absence levels would result in an almost £4bn improvement in productivity.

Another key function of HR is the development and delivery of training programs. Using training to facilitate an improved health and safety culture can have a significant impact on lost time.
 
Thames Water is a large organization, employing 5,500 people in Britain and serving 15 million customers. Five years ago, it launched an ambitious internal education program with the aim of having as many of its managers as possible pass the NEBOSH General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety.
 
The thinking behind the program was simple. Thames Water wanted to embed a culture of safety and health across the entire organization. To achieve this, they believed all managers, as well as their executive team, needed to have a far greater level of knowledge and understanding to competently manage health and safety issues.
 
Today, almost 600 of Thames Water’s frontline managers have achieved a NEBOSH General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety, and this has led to major improvements in safety and health management. Karl Simons, Head of Health, Safety and Well-being at Thames Water said: “We've had an over 80% reduction in both work-related injuries and illness leading to lost time, as a result of the up-skilling of our frontline managers. It has been an extremely powerful program.”
 
He added: “The training has also led to significant cultural change across the entire organization. As a consequence of this investment, health and safety is now seen as an enabler of work, as opposed to historically being seen as a blocker. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in people’s willingness to challenge unsafe acts or conditions without fear of reprisal, so the culture has been altered to one of fairness, which in turn has driven more openness and transparency across the company.”

There’s another benefit arising from HR professionals getting more involved in health and safety, and this one is individual rather than organisational.
 
Multi-skilled managers and employees who have a wide-range of skills, as well as a key specialism, can be incredibly valuable in the workplace. There is even a term for this kind of worker who are known as “T-shaped”. The top line of the T represents the broad knowledge, skills and experience the person has, while the vertical line is all about their deeper, disciplinary competence. Employees who are T-shaped are seen as being able to improve the quality of decision-making within organizations, be more innovative and are capable of thinking more strategically in their roles.
 
Adding a further string to your own bow, perhaps through the acquisition of a formal qualification in an area such as health safety, can help HR professionals become more T-shaped in another people-centered discipline. Of course, it can also help in your own personal development.
 
So, please don’t think of health and safety as someone else’s responsibility. It’s good for your colleagues, good for HR and could be good for you too.
 
*Report: Change at Work: How Absence, Attitudes, and Demographics are impacting UK employers (First Care, 2017)