When it comes to managing safety across multiple locations, it is a definite challenge, but not an impossible task.
It can be easy to underestimate the extra resources required in order to effectively scale business operations and to tend to the unique needs of each location. Failure to prepare your Health & Safety arrangements for expansion can jeopardise the overall compliance of the business.
What sort of challenges does a multi-site organisation face?
1. Inconsistent practices
It’s not enough to have strong local management if they don’t have a company-wide policies and arrangements to which they can refer. Clear, consistent procedures and documentation need to be scaled across the organisation and management must be sure employees from every business unit understand them – this will reduce the risk of the silo syndrome, where each business unit or function interacts within its own “silo” rather than with other locations across the business, leading to a duplication of cost and effort, lack of synergy and little knowledge transfer.
2. Real time visibility and reporting
Obtaining Health & Safety performance data will be key to establishing key performance indicators (KPI’s) across the various locations. Activity and performance can be monitored across many variables such as:
- Risk assessment compliance – can you score individual sites or department’s scores in terms of controls measures in risk assessments actually being in place, and effective?
- Audit scores - from general office or warehouse audits to more detailed racking or electrical safety audits, establishing scores across the whole business will be essential for management to know where to invest resources.
- Accident management – essential to establish trends such as type of accident including location, severity and staff involved.
3. Accessibility to information
A manual, administratively heavy management system will be difficult to keep on top of. From version controlling documents to ensuring all staff have access to the most current versions of policies, risk assessment, safe systems of work and general forms. A scalable, effective Health & Safety management system requires consistent documentation that is available with the appropriate levels of confidentiality and integrity.
5. Awareness of responsibilities
An effective Health & Safety management system will invariably produce numerous outputs as part of its day-to-day operations. Many of these outputs will be tasks that need to be managed and monitored to ensure they are being completed and if not, establishing why not. If you are a manager – do you have awareness to all tasks in your business (to do, doing, done, overdue)? Multiple tasks across sites can quickly become difficult to track and manage, resulting in tasks not being completed.
6. Cost effective training
The Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 requires you to provide whatever information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the Health & Safety at work of your employees. How you consistently deliver this training to the relevant staff across the business with minimal disruption is the challenging part, along with the documentation and any required refresher training. It will also be beneficial to have reporting in line with point 2 above.
How can the BCarm system can address the 5 points above
- Business structure can be replicated with system access limited if required to individuals areas of responsibility. By having your organisations organisational structure replicated in a Health & Safety management system, consistent documentation (risk assessments/checklists/SSOW) can be distributed across the multiple business groups and controlled centrally.
- Live reporting of all Health & Safety activity is achieved through real time compliance scoring on various aspects of the Health & Safety system. Below is an example of a risk assessment monitoring report by org groups, this enables the management team to access detailed data and drill down where required to understand why for example, Site B is scoring lower than the other sites.
3. The BCarm system will ensure all documentation is version controlled and stored safely. Changes to forms, procedures and arrangements can be done in a controlled manner, with data integrity and availability depending on who needs to see it, and when.
4. Accountability can be created by allocating the different elements of your Health & Safety arrangements across the organisation and tracking their performance. Tasks will be driven from activity carried out, e.g. if an audit is completed and corrective actions are required, you can allocate these tasks and track them to give visibility and accountability of all corrective and preventative actions.
5. Visibility of all training activity: the BCarm system will enable management of all training activity and send reminders to key personnel when training is due. The days of taking numerous staff away from their day to day work to conduct awareness training is a thing of the past - e-learning can be done when it is convenient for the employee and managed centrally.
Unlimited support
Support is on hand whether it’s using the system, implementation or guidance with developing the Health & Safety Management System, with instant access to our Help Desk Team. Our consultants can also provide onsite Health & Safety support either on ad-hoc, project or annual support contract basis.
Who are BCarm?
We believe that risk management delivers more than just protection and compliance. It can enhance operational effectiveness, create employee engagement and accountability, delivering improved business performance and competitive advantage.
Through a combination of cloud-based risk management systems, risk consultancy and engagement support we help businesses establish practical risk management in their business that can be operationalised alongside other business processes.
If you would like to discuss Health & Safety management in your organisation, contact our Client Engagement Team on 0800 979 9981 or email info@bcarm.co.uk