ASSE: Support of Top Management for Safety is Leaders’ Key Concern

At a recent meeting of ASSE chapter leaders, those attending were asked to cite the six most pressing issues facing safety professionals today.

In asking, the leaders were not given a prepared list to check off. Instead, “we gave them a blank sheet of paper,” said Warren Brown, ASSE president-elect at the time, as reported in Occupational Health & Safety Magazine. “The responses were across the board.”

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Those responses included a lack of resources to do their job, globalization without safety education, a deficit of young professionals to replace retirees, and job burnout. But overriding them all was one key concern: lack of support for safety programs by senior management. “The top dog should hold employees accountable,” wrote one respondent, “and businesses must integrate safety into the overall business plan.”

Why doesn’t this happen more often, especially in a business world where CEOs’ statements such as “a safe and healthy environment for our employees is our top concern” are so often heard?

Internationally-known process improvement expert Robert B. Pojasek thinks he knows.

In his award-winning BLR guide, Making the Business Case for EHS, Pojasek strongly makes his own case for why safety doesn’t play a bigger part in the corporate scheme of things.

It’s that most senior managers simply don’t understand safety and environmental management as an essential part of the business. At best, they see it as a necessary evil, forced on them by the government, insurers, and a sense of morality. But central to the organization’s financial and marketplace success? Not a chance!

Yet, maintains Pojasek, there is a connection to profitability, but it won’t be made until EHS professionals understand the barriers to gaining greater management support, and find ways to overcome them.

These are the hurdles to greater C-suite commitment:

Lack of a common language. Just as many EHS professionals are untrained to get their minds around terms like net present value, future net worth, and variable cash flow, top managers are usually unfamiliar with the language of EHS. In fact, they often have “different professional vocabularies and perspectives for evaluating and describing the same conditions,” writes Pojasek.

Inadequate technical skills. Related to the above, financial managers, especially, lack the tools to accurately evaluate safety and environmental protection steps in terms top managers can appreciate. One difficulty is that these managers often step from one industry to another, never learning the business basics of any of their organizations outside the financial area. Of course, technical knowledge is a two-way street, unfortunately blocked at both ends. Few safety managers know finance either.

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Lack of market value for EHS improvements. To many top managers, if something can’t be marketed at a profit, their time is better spent on something else. “The existing EHS regulatory system is generally focused on prescribing and enforcing … standards,” says Pojasek. “It has not gained much success with market mechanisms.” This has started to change in the environmental arena, with companies now poised to sell emissions credits and the like, he adds, “but this trading model still needs to be proved.”

Yet, in looking at potential EHS improvements so narrowly, top managers may be denying their organizations significant financial benefits. And since they’re not likely to see the light on their own, Pojasek believes it’s up to EHS managers to help them. But first, EHS professionals need to know how to use the tools at their disposal.

Pojasek has thoughts on just how to achieve this, and we’ll cover some of them in the next Safety Daily Advisor.