Briefing: Workplace health and safety: a fundamental right

25 Apr 2023

The World Day for Safety and Health at Work 2023 takes place on 28 April and this year will explore how to implement a safe and healthy working environment as a fundamental principle and right at work. This briefing investigates how managers can ensure employees' right to safety is met.

Says Kate Gardner, Health and Safety Trainer at International Workplace:

“All of us have a general moral duty of care to each other. No one likes to see other people being injured, made ill or affected by anything that is dangerous. A responsible employer would expect that their employees can work safely and not be affected by their work – and that at the end of the day, the employee will return home in the same condition in which they arrived to work. This moral duty also extends to any other people who may be affected by the workplace or activities carried out (e.g. contractors, visitors and members of the public). Furthermore, the duty extends to protecting the environment.”

Health and safety performance reporting is well established as an indicator of an organisation’s social responsibility. If a company cannot look after its own employees these days that would represent an indictment against its trustworthiness in general.

The purpose of monitoring is to assess working conditions and practices in an attempt to identify where improvements can be made. In other areas of our work, our performance is measured (hours worked, production volumes, efficiency levels or a range of financial measures: sales, profit, etc.). These are measured against previously agreed criteria, known as performance indicators, which provide us with information about:

What is going on within the business / workplace?
What has happened so far – how well are we doing?
What potential problems or issues do we need to respond to

Performance indicators can measure many different things – financial performance, year on year, and against competitors; market forces; environmental conditions such as local and national legislation; staff turnover; employee engagement – the list goes on.

Performance indicators must be measurable and manageable, and can measure both what has already happened, and what will happen in the future.

Examples of performance indicators are:

Management commitment – attendance at safety meetings, taking part in workplace inspections, leading by example.
Number of training days – the average number of safety training, refresher or skills development days per employee.
Worker involvement – how many employee consultation exercises have taken place, how many staff are involved in workplace inspections or are safety representatives?
Audit and inspection reports – time taken to implement recommendations after inspections, the number of inspections completed against set targets.
Risk assessments – the number of risk assessments that have been carried out, the frequency with which they are reviewed, when generic risk assessment templates are used are they made site or task specific?
Occupational health – how many new occupational health cases have there been? How many people are making use of occupational health services provided in the workplace?
Use of PPE – how well is PPE used in the workplace?

How do you measure health and safety performance?
There are two types of indicators – ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’.

‘Reactive’ indicators give information about aspects of our situation that may impact future performance. Reactive indicators are primarily concerned with investigating accidents, incidents and cases of ill health, i.e. after the event.

‘Proactive’ indicators give information on the outcomes of our past actions. Proactive indicators are all those methods that are used to assess working conditions, general compliance with the law and local policies. Proactive monitoring techniques, such as regular workplace inspections and hazard reporting schemes, can provide a useful insight into general working conditions. Both types of indicators are important.

Benefits of health and safety performance management
Health and safety performance measurement should seek to answer questions such as:

Where are you now, relative to your overall health and safety aims and objectives?
Where are you now in terms of controlling hazards and risks?
How does your organisation compare with others?
Are you getting better or worse over time? What trends are there?
Is your management of health and safety effective (doing the right things)?
Is your management of health and safety reliable (doing things right consistently)?
Is your management of health and safety proportionate to the level of hazards and risks (are we doing enough)?
Is an effective health and safety management system in place across all parts of the organisation?
Is your culture supportive of health and safety?

Says Kate Gardner:

“These questions should be asked not only at the highest level but also at the various management levels and across the organisation. The aim should be to provide a complete picture of the organisation’s health and safety performance. To do this effectively, your organisation needs to adopt a good mix of reactive and proactive measures – there’s no ‘one size fits all’ so what’s good for one organisation may be different for another.

“Organisations review their health and safety performance because it is the only way to track improvement and set objectives and targets for the future. Carrying out reviews will confirm the validity of your health and safety policy, and ensure the system you have in place for managing health and safety is effective. The reviewing process will not only show where you can learn and make changes but can also give the opportunity to continually improve and show health and safety successes within the organisation.”

International Workplace has produced a series of downloadable guides which consider the legal, moral and financial reasons for managing health and safety, including:

Good health and safety performance: A line manager's guide

The moral, legal and financial reasons for managing safely: A line manager's guide