10th Fleming HSE Excellence Conference, 17 - erm.com Fleming HSE Excellence Conference, ... •...

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10th Fleming HSE Excellence Conference, 17th – 18th May 2016

Highlights from ERM


Introduction

Over 180 senior EH&S leaders, many with global or regional safety leadership

responsibilities in multinational companies, participated in the 10th Fleming HSE

Excellence Conference held in Frankfurt on 17th and 18

th May 2016. The topic of the

conference, which ERM co-sponsored, was “Beyond the Plateau: Visible HSE

Leadership by All”. It attracted participants from many European countries and countries

outside Europe, ranging from Azerbaijan, Singapore, UAE and US.

The two-day conference, comprising of presentations, three panel discussions and short

workshops, brought together a range of perspectives from industrial companies,

consulting groups and HSE software service providers. This summary is ERM’s

perspective on the major themes of the conference covering:

• Visible Leadership

• Safety Culture

• Management Systems

• The Changing Role of Regulations

• Beyond the Plateau

Observations and Insights

Visible Leadership

The role and nature of visible leadership was the golden thread running through the

conference. This topic gave rise to a number of powerful presentations, stimulating

insights and generating robust debate.

Malc Staves, Global Health & Safety Director at L’Oreal described his company’s

approach to developing a visible leadership culture, and the importance of leaders being

focused on those activities that have the potential to cause serious injuries and fatalities.

He described L’Oreal’s rigorous assessment approach to (a) identify the ways in which

people could conceivably be killed working for L’Oreal and (b) implement robust

approaches to progressively reduce and eliminate those high potential workplace risks.

Brian Darlington, Global Head of Safety & Health of Mondi spoke with passion about the

international packaging and paper group’s Safety from the Heart programme. He

challenged the delegates whether they personally deliver against uncompromising visible

and felt leadership. He reinforced this with an interactive exercise of 9 questions, ranging

from “have I had a safety contact session with someone in the past two weeks” to “do I

read the emergency evacuation rules on my hotel room door”, testing each individuals

safety commitment. Strikingly, for a group of EHS leaders, only 2 people in the room (out

of 180) were able to answer positively for all questions, reinforcing Brian’s point (he

quoted Gandhi) that “we must be the change we want to see in the world”.


This thought provoking session was followed a Big Panel Debate which included Anthony

Wareham of Royal Philips, Alastair Davey of Sodexo, Brian Darlington of Mondi and

ERM’s John Waters, with the discussion focused on 3 key questions:

1. What’s the future of Health & Safety Leadership?

2. How do H&S Leaders generate followers?

3. How do you convert all staff to H&S Leaders?

There was strong agreement on

a point made by Anthony

Wareham, Head of Health,

Safety and Security at Royal

Philips Health Technology, that

H&S leadership must be

effectively integrated into normal

operations, and operational

leadership responsibilities. John

Waters, Global Managing

Partner at ERM quoted from a

2014 Campbell Institute report

on Defining EHS leadership in

world class organizations, which

concluded that companies with great H&S performance tend to have high employee

engagement, elevated customer satisfaction, increased efficiency and productively. As

such, EHS is a leading indicator of excellent business performance.

The second and third questions engendered heated debate, not least on whether all staff

can be safety leaders. However there was consensus that leadership and followership

required individuals to take action - active engagement – and that successful

organisations maximise the number of their employees that identify, manage and report

risk.

Alastair Davey, Global Vice President – Health, Safety & Environment of Sodexo, the

international services company, described leader site walks as being extremely powerful

to demonstrate safety leadership and enroll all staff in active followership. This reinforced

a point previously made by Malc Staves about L’Oreal’s “Constructive Challenge

Programme”. Everybody in their company has between 4-6 hours training on how to

challenge people about safety behaviour in a positive way.

The panel also discussed the importance of leaders progressively focusing on meaningful

leading indicators, rather than lagging metrics. The discussion concluded with the

observation that we need more Positive Safety dialogue and leadership; enrolling people

as the solution rather than as a problem to control, and more productive learning reviews

on what goes well, not just what went wrong.

Maija Vaismaa, Senior Development Manager, Quality & HSE at marine supply company,

Wartsila, described the practical elements of Wartsila’s visible leadership programme.

She talked about the importance of campaigns, which are fun and engaging, to make

progress on the safety journey. As an example she described “Save your Fingers” where


handprints were used to good effect on posters all around their facilities to drive home the

message about prevention of hand injuries. This campaign also featured on the front

cover of Wartsila’s Annual report.

Towards the end of the conference, a workshop comprising a subset of the participants

discussed Visible EHS Leadership and Accountability. The group noted that you ‘can’t

tell leaders what to do, particularly operational leaders. Too many times H&S leaders

provide them with the ‘what and how’ but programmes fail to connect the message with

‘why this is important for me’ as a leader and the broader operational benefits of strong

H&S performance. The group agreed that leaders need to be trained to complete

effective site walks and to deploy listening and positively engaging communication skills.

ERM Perspective

In our experience of working with companies across the world, leadership at all levels is key to successfully changing culture and behaviours, and delivering better performance. As Brian Darlington of Mondi powerfully illustrated, ERM believes that what leaders do, not just what they say, is fundamental to successfully reducing incidents of life changing injuries and fatalities. ERM has worked with senior leaders at board level at major corporations, and with front line supervisors in high hazard environments to help them dramatically improve the quality of their safety engagements with staff, and build the capacity of their organisations to better recognise hazards, manage risks and implement critical controls. In our experience many organisations expect their leaders to ‘”walk the talk”, yet don’t provide them the training and coaching to do this. Training combined with practical field based coaching for leaders and supervisors has proven to be very effective to build capability and experience.

Safety Culture

Safety Culture was a persistent underlying element in the Visible Leadership theme. It

was also the subject of a breakout session at the end of the conference. Key points that

emerged were:

• Culture is a product of senior leadership words and actions;

• Culture defines acceptable behaviours within an organisation, and leaders must

take personal responsibility, and action to demonstrate the right behaviours and

ensure they are sustained;

• Health and wellbeing are increasingly important as part of a holistic, coherent

safety culture.

o Malc Staves of L’Oreal described how they were extending safety

beyond the workplace, to contribute to a safer home life for their

employees, as well as a safer workplace.

o Jeanette Soby Sten Nielsen, Global Strategy & Programme Manager

from Novo Nordisk described how Novo Health is Novo Nordisk’s anchor

to integrate and create shared ownership of employee health within their

organisation.


o Kieran Phelan, Global Health & Safety Director of William Grant & Sons

Distillers gave examples on practical stress management.

o Dr Tim Marsh of RMS noted that 135 people were killed at work in the

UK last year. However 5,000 working people committed suicide.

Therefore stress and depression, while not solely a work problem, is

demonstrably work related, and impacts materially on companies, their

employees and their families.

o The relevance was confirmed by the participants in one of the small

workshops that focused on psychosocial risks. Participants shared that

they see this area as the “next step” on the journey. The related portion

to lost time at work, upcoming legal requirements, and the challenge of

identifying and reducing psychosocial aspects due to its multi-causal

character were discussed.

• Some companies are actively mapping the cultural maturity of their supply chain.

Jay Beers, VP SHE – EMEAI of AECOM explained that they check where their

contractors are on the Bradley Curve, and work with these contractors to ensure

that their action plans will drive them towards continuous improvement, with clear

accountability, and commitment to deliver.

A workshop group discussed how to measure a “Safety Culture”. It was noted that

culture surveys can be helpful but only if they lead to practical actions and a clear

roadmap for improvement. The participants noted that the best outcomes occurred when

people used professional help to develop these.

ERM Perspective

Safety Culture is one of the most widely misunderstood elements of effective safety management. It is a product of leadership commitment words and actions but it is developed and embedded by the behaviours of all employees. How an organisation breathes life into its system and processes, and enrolls and engages employees define a safety culture. An organisation needs to ensure their safety culture is not solely focused on personal occupational safety, it must also include process safety management.

Management Systems

Management or Operating Systems were covered extensively during the conference.

Anthony Wareham of Royal Philips talked about his experience in his prior company,

Honeywell, with a well-established operating system, modelled originally on the Toyota

Operating System, and how HSE was progressively and successfully integrated into the

Honeywell Operating System.

A number of the key software vendors described their solutions to create digital operating

systems with effective performance data capture driving continuous improvement actions.

J-J Van Der Bij, Executive EHS Leader, from GE Oil & Gas described the use of a digital

roadmap on their journey to HSE excellence. GE is going “all out in digital” and wants to

provide the right information at the point of work to employees in an effective ‘just-in-time’

manner.


ERM’s Edna Besnainou demonstrated

that some management systems are

failing the test of time. Mature systems

can be so bureaucratic that they are

causing performance drag, with some

procedures disconnected from how work

is actually done at the frontline. Such

systems, as well as inefficient, can also

be very expensive to maintain. Edna

offered four suggestions to empower,

rather than encumber, users of such

management systems, and extract

greater value from existing investments

in safety, which are illustrated in the slide below.

A Panel Debate was held on ‘How to get the most out of EHS Management Systems’.

The functionality that the various software providers describe is almost boundless,

however all were agreed that organisations need to think long and hard about what

objectives they are seeking to achieve and to take the opportunity to tailor the software

solutions to meet their needs, rather than be driven by the full software functionality.

Many of the observations and questions in this area led to discussions about the pace of

software change, that systems need to be agile, and they need to be future proof to

communicate with other software within the organization. The importance of user friendly

Source: ERM 2016


interfaces/dashboards, with the right level of information available for management, front

line workers and supervisors, was reinforced. Each tailored to their needs.

ERM Perspective

One ERM client has described the ever increasing amount of data available as “infobesity”. The key challenge is to turn all this data into knowledge and management information that triggers performance improvement actions.

When a company implements software solutions, such as SAP and Enablon ERM Information Solutions help companies, as implementation partner, specify software solutions to meet their needs, and leverage our deep EH&S skills to support appropriate change management and effective implementation. As an illustration, for a major corporation replacing their incident management system, we were able to align different approaches used in parts of the company to facilitate deeper lessons learned reviews and leverage safety learnings across the whole company.

The Changing Role of Regulations

Discussions on regulations at the conference mainly centered on developments in the

UK, where the proportion of workplace deaths is lowest in the world. According to Dr

Richard Judge, Chief Executive of the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK, this is

due, in part, to the fact that risk based regulation was introduced in 1974 and has evolved

progressively over the past 40 years. Dr Judge described the HSE’s focus as being on

lives lost and lives shortened. The key theme that Richard concluded with was enabling

productivity through proportionate risk assessment.

UK Lawyer, Madeleine Abas highlighted the role of major public enquiries in the UK in

generating major lessons learned, whether associated with industrial accidents or major

transport accidents.

Steffan Groch, Chair of the UK’s Health and Safety Lawyers Association talked about

reputation management increasingly driving HSE onto boardroom agendas. He noted

that the balance is definitely shifting between adopting a legally led strategy in response

to a major incident or safety crisis, or stakeholder led strategy. He contrasted the

approaches taken by Thomas Cook and Alton Towers theme park in major accident

responses as demonstrating that major accidents are always expensive, high profile

events with consequent reputation damage. Organisations must be clear on who their

stakeholders are. Their response to an incident needs to be consistent with their stated

policies on corporate social responsibility, and responding ethically and appropriately to

victims. According to Groch, the Thomas Cook legal led response significantly

compounded the business impact and cost arising from the original tragedy. Alton

Towers stakeholder led approach mitigated this collateral impact; in time, cost and

residual reputation. Groch also talked about new stricter sentencing and higher fines in

the UK, which are also pushing HSE further onto board agendas.


ERM Perspective

Learning from accidents – specifically those with a high public or media interest - is often undermined by the rush to find a simple root cause. Despite the original best intentions of companies, too often this ends with blame attached to an individual or a contractor. In ERM’s experience, legal led processes can accentuate this problem, compromising the ability to develop deeper understanding about how an incident occurred, establishing the organisational dynamics that created the conditions for the incident, and building resilience to prevent it happening again. It is vital that approaches are used that draw out the deeper learnings, with employees contributing actively to improve the alignment between work as planned, and work as actually done.

Beyond the Plateau

It was clear from many presentations, and the debate at the conference that a lot of the

organisations represented had reached a performance plateau. Safety performance had

improved significantly over the recent years but more recently was plateauing, particularly

for potential, or actual, serious injury and fatality.

ERM Perspective

Many companies experience “plateauing” in their safety performance. For some companies further work on areas such as leadership, behavior and streamlining systems can break through their current performance plateaus. For others, their opportunities for incremental improvement are more limited because their plateau is closer to “zero”.

Increasingly complex work environments require managers to identify “what works well” and employees at the sharp end to make situational, safe decisions. In these environments, safety becomes more than just the absence of accidents.

ERM has found that looking at safety from a new “Positive Safety” angle provides an opportunity to actively engage managers and enroll employees in safety, in a way where they are the solution, rather than the problem to control. It accumulates individual skills into a sustainable safety culture characterised by empowerment, care and continual organisational learning, contributing to safety performance breakthroughs in organisations with mature systems.


About ERM

ERM is the world’s leading sustainability consultancy.

We help our clients protect their people and their businesses by developing and

implementing tailored safety solutions to address their strategic and tactical needs. Our

support includes business focused services on personal and process safety, including

information management solutions.

To find out more how ERM can help you go to www.erm.com or your local ERM contact.

If you would like any more insight about this conference, please contact

John Waters Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 20 3206 5249 Mobile: +44 7887 520307

Edna Besnainou Email: [email protected] Tel: +49 61 0220 6132 Mobile: +49 1511 451 6132

The information contained herein is of a general nature and is not intended to address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity.

Although we endeavor to provide accurate and timely information, there can be no guarantee that such information is accurate as of the date it is

received, or that it will continue to be accurate in the future. No one should act on such information without appropriate professional advice after a

thorough examination of the particular situation. ERM would be pleased to advise readers how the points made within this document apply to their

circumstances. ERM accepts no responsibility, or liability for any loss a person may suffer for acting or refraining to act, on the material in this

document.

© 2016 ERM (Environmental Resources Management UK Limited). All rights reserved.

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