Some of the key elements of an effective health and safety program are management commitment and leadership from the top where they provide the necessary resources to enhance health and safety activities within a company. It has to come from the top so that middle management is not tempted to take shortcuts and supervisors will follow the lead of middle management and then the workers.
There is also a bottom up approach where the workers through the venue say of health and safety committees, one-on-ones with the management team, emails, texting a two-way communication they participate in the process and become self-reinforcing. They make sure people wear the PPE where they are supposed to so instead of having one set of eyes of the health and safety person you have hundreds or thousands.
Another effective component of this cycle is effective claims management. When incidents do happen the claims are dealt with promptly and legally usually within 24 hours of them happening or more immediate than that or at the latest 48 hours of them happening. Effective claims management means that a worker, an injured worker is rehabilitated, kept in contact with the company so they feel part of the organization and brought back to work as promptly as possible because studies have shown the longer a worker is off work the less likely he/she is to return to their job and the more depressed they may become and unable to work.
This cycle I call the virtualist cycle because it reinforces each other. Management commitment and leadership provides the resources, worker participation really provides the ownership and effective claims management done well can save money. You actually get money back from the government which you can apply to your preventative efforts which is composed of management leadership and worker participation which drives down further the claims costs. So it reinforces each other.
What many organizations lack is integration of these systems. They operate in silos if they operate at all and the net effect is you have an ineffective and inefficient health and safety culture and organization which costs both in terms financially, morally, legislatively and in terms of due diligence.
