ABSTRACT
It’s said ‘you get the safety levels senior management want – all else is just detail and case study’.
One of our clients is considered very much the H&S leader in their field. This stems not from any work we’ve done with them lately but from an incident at a funeral some 11 years ago when they were very average in terms of safety standards. An employee had been killed and at the funeral a rather apprehensive MD was approached by the widow who instead of attacking or abusing him (as he expected) thanked him sincerely for showing her husband the respect of attending. Relieved and humbled he made himself a promise …
Obviously this book cannot be of much use where there is little high level commitment to improve. Excellent safety management at a strategic level is always essential. Two other examples of that: we have a client that bought into an industry (waste disposal) but found in practice that because of historical contracts the promise ‘safely or not at all’ simply couldn’t be kept if a profit was to be made. They exited. Another client (in the offshore oil and gas industry) has a rule that they will, for any number of commercial reasons, subcontract a high risk activity. But they have a rule that, in order to maximise control, they will only subcontract it once … as they know that each time an activity is contracted a little more control is lost and a little more risk and variability added.
