A proactive safety approach at the workplace is the result of a high level of health and safety maturity. Organizations that prioritize safety view it as a core part of the business. It’s also seen as everyone’s responsibility and an effective measure of performance, which results in greater employee protection and fewer workplace incidents.
What is health and safety maturity? What does perfection look like? How can I get there? We will answer all these questions and more in this blog. Keep reading to explore topics like:
Before we get into how to reach a high level of health and safety maturity, it’s important to understand what health and safety maturity is. Health and Safety Maturity is how sophisticated your organization’s health and safety program, procedures, and workflows are. It helps to assess how effectively your organization can manage safety hazards to truly prevent workplace incidents from occurring.
There are several different safety maturity models like the Dupont Bradley Curve and the Hudson Safety Maturity Model. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus on the Maturity Model developed by Dr. Mark Fleming.
At the Keil Centre, Dr. Mark Fleming developed a safety maturity model adopted by the United Kingdom Health and Safety Executive. This model contains 5 levels of safety maturity.
They include:
To reach the highest level, some of the many things employers can do is:
Let’s dive a little deeper into each element.
Something all organizations with a high level of safety maturity have in common is health and safety at the centre of their business. It affects everything they do and lays the foundation for successful performance.
For example, let’s take strategy. If safety is a fundamental part of your approach, your aim will be to protect employees and create a safer, more sustainable working environment. When this is at the root of all decisions, you will begin to get the right stakeholders in the room when it comes time to establish goals and the methods you will use to accomplish them. You will also consider the right resources, equipment, and systems that you need to reach your goals.
With safety at centre stage, you can elevate your safety maturity while reducing workplace incidents. This will result in greater efficiency, better brand credibility, and ultimately more business.
From C-suite executives to the front-line workforce, safety is everyone’s responsibility. Elevate your safety maturity by helping all team members acknowledge this and by creating a sense of accountability.
How can you do this? It starts with senior leadership. They must show their dedication and commitment to safety. This is done by including health and safety performance as part of the goals for the business, showing that they are providing the organization with the right resources to accomplish these goals, and asking employees for feedback.
This brings us to our second point. Senior leadership and front-line employees must collaborate to help improve your safety maturity level. Leadership that values employee feedback and takes their opinions into consideration, builds a more empowered workforce. This will improve your safety culture, making employees feel truly accountable for each other’s safety, and raising your safety maturity level.
Another key element to help raise your safety maturity level is data and analytics. It is when you collect and monitor the right safety metrics, KPI’s and more that you can truly elevate your safety performance.
With a comprehensive view of your safety performance, you can begin to identify areas of weakness and strengths. This will help you prioritize what you need to work on to more effectively reduce hazards on site. Measure both leading and lagging indicators such as training completed by employees, action item completion status, safety meetings conducted, lost time injury frequency rates (LTIFR), days away restricted or transferred (DART), and many more.
Once you identify the metrics needed to accomplish your safety goals, you can start to track trends and patterns in your data. You can now make data-driven decisions to create a more proactive safety approach. Make sure you share this data with employees, so they are aware of safety strengths and weaknesses.
Health and safety maturity is a complex topic and we’ve just skimmed the surface. Before you take action, make sure you are reading as much as you can on the topic and collecting all the information you need to develop a proper strategy to elevate health and safety maturity at your organization.
Reaching the next stage is challenging, so we want to help you get there with the right resources in your toolkit.
>> If you want to explore more about the level of safety maturing in your organization, start by taking this quick quiz.