Leadership Summit on Health and Safety Action

By Bjorn Rutten, Senior Research Associate, National Security and Public Safety

At the Industrial Accident Prevention Association’s annual conference in Toronto, Ontario this past April, the CEO Health & Safety Leadership Charter held the Leadership Summit. The summit brings together CEOs, presidents, and other leaders to work together to identify how they can improve their abilities in transforming the health and safety cultures and activities in their organizations.
This year, the summit focused on successfully engaging boards of directors, staff, and supply chain partners in a renewed emphasis and priority on health and safety. Participants heard from experts in the field, shared their own experiences, and identified the following specific actions that CEOs can take to transform their health and safety cultures.

1. Be educated
The CEO must develop a clear understanding of what the risk environment of the company is, how it affects employee health and safety, and what the potential consequences for the business are.

2. Build a business case
Building a business case towards health and safety requires identifying the benefits of being active and engaged (such as increased attractiveness as an employer) versus the negative effects of neglecting health and safety (such as legal liability and increased injury-related costs).

3. Communicate clearly and consistently
Health and safety messages not only have to be unambiguous and continuous, they should also come from multiple sources and from all levels of the organization. Communication should be bidirectional so that employees take ownership, form their own opinions, and provide input.

4. Embody corporate health and safety values
A CEO who leads by example and actually models the desired behaviour is seen as caring and personally committed—which will do a lot more to motivate employees to change their behaviour than any written policies.

5. Integrate health and safety into every element of the business
The CEO should work to make health and safety a standing agenda and reporting item at the board level. The CEO should include it in individual job descriptions and goal agreements throughout the company, and make health and safety one of the criteria for the selection of suppliers and contractors and to maintain a dialogue with them.

6. Be accountable and hold others accountable
Health and safety must become a factor in company and individual performance reviews, and appropriate metrics will help to achieve this. The goal must be to make health and safety an ongoing, genuine and visible concern in everything the company does. Nobody is better positioned to lead this kind of a broad and pervasive initiative than the CEO.

Article published in Your Workplace magazine issue 11-5