Leadership in Safety and health enhances business sustainability

Safety enhances business. Healthy and safe workplaces are more productive and make businesses more sustainable. Sustainability is an emerging topic in India. What the word Sustainability in this context means is that the business should be able to sustain as it is now. It does not mean that the company should not grow.

Sustainable development is the one that takes the future generation also into consideration. Similarly, when a business expands, it should take care that the expansion should not negatively affect its stakeholders.

Sustainability is a new agenda that is yet to be imbibed into the hearts of most of the organizations - Unlike Safety, Quality or Environment those that have been made a practice in organizations through Integrated Management Systems that include OHSAS 18001, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 respectively.

Sustainability is not an entirely new thing or something that is mutually exclusive of the above mentioned three arms of IMS, it is rather the least understood among all. Without a clear understanding of meaning, it is difficult for an organization to integrate sustainability into business strategy. But rather than a threat to safety, health and the environment, sustainability offers leaders an opportunity to use their expertise to advance the way an organization operates.

Achieving and sustaining an injury-free workplace demands strong leadership. From recycling and switching over to renewable energy to community investment and ethical sourcing, sustainability efforts have become a significant part of many company strategies. Companies make reduction in use of energy, sourcing a percentage of their energy use from green sources, tapping the green energy resources available with them etc a part of their IMS goals – this and such other examples prove to use that Sustainability is easily achievable incorporating with or parallel with the IMS procedures.

Safety is at the core of sustainability. Sustainability really comes down to three principles:

“Doing no harm” – no organization can claim sustainability when it continues to have life threatening incidents, injuries or environmental incidents.

“Leaving no footprint” – I remember a campaign against the use of plastics showing two images – One of a tiger leaving the remains of the prey (The remains of the prey helps identify that it had been eaten partially by some carnivore. The second one was of plastic bottles and wrappers in the forest; which were the footprints eft by man. The product life cycle issues and the way in the production is performed and the usage of raw materials have to be reviewed by the top management.

 “Doing some good” represents the fundamental value an organization adds, which may go beyond basic products and services. Safety leaders can support these principles through sharing their experience in effecting organizational change for good. HSE managers have their expertise in developing appropriate and robust business cases for securing the necessary resources and commitment for safety interventions. The same maybe copied.

Like safety, sustainability is not about a function or department doing sustainability (or safety). It’s about running the business in a way that’s consistent with guiding principles. The Integrated Management system approach teaches us the same. Sustainability also must find its way into the organization’s day-to-day activities. Safety leaders can offer invaluable expertise in how to embed and sustain principles into engineering, systems, processes and culture.

For sustainability to be anything more than a marketing spin, its principal activities must be framed with a view to an organization’s end-to-end effects. The effects on the employees, stakeholders, environment – everything should be considered with due importance because none deserves less importance than the other. Safety leaders have considerable expertise in this area. Environmental, health and safety leaders have developed models that have broadened our understanding of everything from injury causation to culture – in turn transforming solutions, activities and results. As with safety, an effective sustainability framework helps the organization see past immediate effects to those that will be felt long after a product has left the building. The impact of a wrong product, impact of poor marketing, impact of excessive dependency n one supplier etc on the customer base should be visualized with foresight. The impacts of those HR policies on employees and stakeholders; the impact of the finance team squeezing money from a particular budget to divert it to some other use – everything should be covered under sustainability.

As safety leaders, we can help our colleagues achieve sustainable performance. There is one thing to be noted before we go forward to build the foundation for sustainability: We must never lose sight of our obligation to continue perfecting EHS disciplines. With around 2,000 recorded workplace fatalities a year in the country, and 40,000 workplace fatalities according to ILOs estimate of India for the year 2005, continued environmental spills and releases, many exposures persisting inside and outside the workplace, lack of proper understanding of the works being carried out, lack of management commitment,  becoming a stable bedrock for sustainability demands that we maintain our focus on “doing no harm” where we are.

So ‘Lets work. For people and for businesses.’