In order to manage health and safety effectively, it is essential that periodically, organisations should set out a clear and concise account of their health and safety performance.
This will enable all employees to understand progress in achieving health and safety objectives and for those with management responsibilities, to communicate such information to key internal and external audiences.
Let's go back a step
In order to look back on how a health and safety management system is performing and to analyse the data to drive continual improvement, a business will need a reporting system.
While the wider business may report on areas with a positive connotation, for health and safety it too often comes down to one negative measure, injury and ill health statistics - measures of failures.
Very few organisations can provide data on much more than accident or ill health statistics, what about the actual performance of the organisations health and safety management system? If a business follows the Plan, Do, Check, Act methodology, they will no doubt have management data collated during the audit or 'Check' process that can help drive performance across the business.
How might the compliance performance be measured?
- Pro-active Monitoring of Risk Assessments - regularly structured pro-active monitoring and quantifiable reporting on the operation of Risk Assessment Control Measures – the things that actually deliver a safe environment. Why shouldn’t a business owner be able to quantify health and safety performance alongside any other business metric?
- Training – particularly E-Learning – this is producing competency data and if your E-Learning platform also captures risk exposures in the individuals working environment, then you are also enabling discrete risk sampling.
- Safety Sampling – any checklist or audit will produce a performance score, and will identify failings or areas for improvement in safety arrangements.
- Maintenance Checks – are capable of providing a performance score.
What are the challenges?
Not monitoring performance - any aspect of a business can be measured; but only if you are monitoring it.
Information is not in a quantitative format - providing just commentary on health and safety performance will not enable detailed enough reporting across the business. Furthermore, information in various formats can take time to collate and this is only made a more difficult task in multi-site businesses.
Manual systems - requires effort and physical space to keep track of paper documents, to find information and to keep details secure.
Accessibility - having real-time reporting of health and safety compliance across multiple sites can be challenging without an effective live reporting mechanism.
Poor Health and Safety reporting and metrics will result in a reduced level of governance and understanding of where the business' risk exposures are.
How can BCarm facilitate Health & Safety reporting?
The reporting suite will give instant access to information at all business levels, this data will be collated from the following sources:
- Risk Assessment Monitoring - As risk assessments are monitored and reviewed in the system, scores will be generated in terms of compliance on risk assessment control measures and whether or not the control measures are in place.
- Checklists/Audits - Internal assurance scores gained through the completion of checklists will be an important part of the compliance picture and will enable the business to consistently report on audit activity.
- Accident Management - Effective reporting and thorough investigation of all accidents/incidents can go a long way in preventing injury and even death. The BCarm system will allow the business to access various accident reporting and investigation forms to ensure the correct information is documented. The dashboard and reporting suite will generate management information that can be used to track corrective actions and manage cases to a close.
- Training Data - How many staff are competent in various subjects? How often is training carried out and is it renewed when required? Staff training is an essential part of the wider health and safety management; the training module will allow detailed reporting on staff attendance with automatic reminders when courses are due. The E-Learning sytem will allow staff to complete health and safety training modules on demand.
- Plant/Asset Maintenance - Having an overview of equipment service schedules and planned preventative maintenance allows you to substantially reduce reactive maintenance as a result of breakdowns. The PPE, Plant and Asset manager will enable management of essential equipment and be able to notify staff when PPE needs replacing, or equipment requires service or maintenance checks.
In summary visible, accurate data will help your organisation find the best ways to lead and promote health and safety across the business. Periodic reporting does not need to be a chore that ties up staff on time consuming, error prone processes; an effective health and safety management system will have a reporting function that is up to date, and accessible as required.
If you would like to discuss management reporting for your organisation, or how systems can produce the information you want to support existing reporting, contact our Client Engagement Team on 0800 979 9981 or email info@bcarm.co.uk