The size of a safety department depends on the cultural maturity level of an organisation argues Rajesh Nair.
Safety practitioners have played a pivotal role in ensuring people do not get hurt at work places since the 19th Century. Although the aim of a safety practitioner has always been to save lives, the roles they play in an organisation has differed from time to time.
The question that intrigues me is: when it comes to safety…
This article is not about how to use empirical formula to find out how big a safety organisation needs to be, it’s about understanding the concept of safety and what could be the right line of thinking for the management on staffing the safety department.
The question is a valid one across various organisations, but we will examine the question in a manufacturing/construction organisation.
There are operating and manufacturing organisations that stipulate a ratio of 1:200 of safety practitioners to employees, or construction companies that stipulate a ratio of 1:50 when high risk activities are being undertaken.
These ratios are often documented in the contracts and the incoming contractor brings in a brigade of safety professionals. A company employing 3,000 construction workers will bring 60-70 safety practitioners on site who would then flood the site, but the question is: is this going to make the site any safer? Does hiring a high number of safety supervisors lead to better safety performance?
A paper published by the IOSH research committee in 2001 [Prof Andy P Smith and Dr Emma J K Wadsworth Cardiff University] concludes that safety performance is independently associated with the safety culture.
It also concludes that employee perception of safety also affects the safety performance. The paper goes on to examine the dependency of quality safety advice to the safety performance and it identifies that there certainly is dependency.
However the paper suggests that separate research would be required to establish dependency of quality safety advice to the safety performance as the relationship is very complex. Through this paper and many others it becomes clear that safety performance depends on the organisational culture, specifically safety culture.
Safety culture has been defined in various ways however the most accepted definition is that it is joint values, attitudes, and behaviours that organisations hold for safety. In short it is all about how an organisation collectively works towards keeping its employees safe.
A safety culture maturity model has been defined by the Keil Centre for HSE and was first published in 2001. The paper mentions there are five levels of safety maturity models. The levels 1 to 5 are emerging; managing; involving; cooperating; and continuous improvement.
Safety is defined as any process undertaken to prevent or mitigate the damage to personnel, environment and assets. Safety is never about the stock taking of injured personnel or cost of injury but it is always about controls put in place to protect people.
Levels one to three (emerging to involving) are those where safety belongs primarily to the safety department, with limited involvement from the line manager. Levels 4 and 5 (cooperating and continuous improving) have higher involvement from frontline employees.
The point is that safety practitioners are not involved in the manufacturing or production or allied activities and thus have a limited role in preventing an accident that might occur from these activities. Safety therefore, must not belong to the safety department, but entirely to the line management. The safety practitioner must be in an advisory and auditing role and assist the team with working safely.
So, the number of safety personnel required by an organisation depends on the level of safety culture maturity. For an organisation with a highly mature safety culture – where safety is considered a core value – business or processes are designed to give a safe output and the frontline personnel are trained to work safely. In those cases there is no added advantage in having a big safety organisation. The safety personnel can be limited and play role of an advisor and auditor.
For an organisation with a less mature safety culture where people aren’t trained and processes are not designed to provide safe output, more safety practitioners may be required. An organisation’s safety culture matures when the safety knowledge moves out of the safety department and becomes part of the day-to-day operation.
As an organisation progresses to higher levels of safety culture the safety department may be trimmed down and the safety practitioners are not required to play their role in day-to-day business.
The size of a safety department depends on the cultural maturity level of an organisation, so employing a large number of safety personal will have a limited impact on the overall safety performance.
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There’s only so far you can go with physical safety measures, policies and procedures – further improvements in organisational Health & Safety performance can be achieved by changing behaviour and creating a positive Health & Safety culture. Generally, organisations with a really strong safety culture don’t need a large team of H&S professionals. These organisations will naturally achieve a high level of safety performance as employees are engaged and take personal responsibility for Health & Safety. The role of their H&S team shifts away from enforcing H&S policy and moves towards providing technical support, advice and guidance, providing employees with… Read more »
I tend to disagree with the premise of this article. As an organisation progresses through the maturity model the role of the safety adviser changes but doesn’t generally diminish. Rather than leading accident investigations the safety adviser will spend more time training and coaching – especially new starters. The effect is that you get a better safety performance, and perhaps there will be a slightly reduced workload, but the organisations that are at the higher level of the maturity model don’t generally have particularly lean H&S departments. The biggest factor in my experience is the amount of work that is… Read more »
The issue of document review, attending meeting and report preparations is another angle where number of Safety Professionals increases. How thos can be delegated to non Safety personnel e.g. operation guy
safety inspector ration 1 for 50 employees . is that any standard or only recommendation?
please I need to clear it ?
I’d be interested to know if any follow up research has been conducted in this area, given we 8 years on from the article. Possibly looking at other industry sectors, but also framing this question in the context of the 2 biggest variables I see – organisational complexity / scalability (how similar or dissimilar are the various sites), and maturity of the H&S culture (as has been alluded already). If anyone has any suggestions for further reading, please reach out