This page is approximately a 4 minute read
This page was published on
Malcolm Staves, Global Vice President of Health and Safety
The new report from the Global Safety Evidence Centre on how leadership and governance affect occupational safety and health has found leaders can drive positive results “by providing strategic direction and management, visible leadership and engagement, systematic oversight and cultural leadership”.
This chimes with our experience at L’Oréal. We have built a safety system over more than a decade that achieves consistently low accident and ill-health rates across manufacturing, research, and distribution operations, with clear, purposeful leadership as its foundation.
Our senior leaders believe that maintaining our position as the world’s leading beauty company depends on ensuring the safety and maximising the health and wellbeing of our 94,000 employees.
The report notes that “visible leadership and engagement are demonstrated through site visits, participation in safety meetings, and direct communication with employees, thereby reinforcing the importance of safety and building trust”.
At L’Oreal we use a range of tools to achieve ‘visible felt leadership’, under which employees are confident that leaders care about their safety and take action to ensure it. Measuring Effectively Safety Using Recognition (MESUR) is our behavioural, visible felt leadership programme for managers, who visit work teams and talk to operators, asking open-ended questions about how tasks could result in injury – such as “what could happen unexpectedly?” or “how might you be harmed?” The aim is to get operators to recognise risks and come up with their own solutions to control them. At the end of a MESUR visit they are asked to summarise the actions they have put forward, to help embed the learning.
Another direct way for employees to engage with improving risk controls is via our Safety Improvement Opportunity (SIO) scheme. Everyone is encouraged to submit ideas for safety or health improvements via an online SIO form. Line managers analyse the forms and decide whether to act on the suggestions, providing the submitting employee with feedback in all cases. Site management also review all SIOs annually, to identify those that would be useful to other sites and parts of the business.
The Global Safety Evidence Centre study finds transparent decision-making and direct communication correlate with better safety outcomes. Our environment, health and safety (EHS) function communicates policy and plans through multiple routes, including roadmaps showing managers the pathways to improvement and to extend their horizons beyond the four or five years common in most business planning.
Engaging with employees and encouraging upward feedback are important, but most fundamental to our leaders’ role in driving safety performance is their commitment to the core system of harm prevention. This demonstrates the “active monitoring and prioritisation of safety” that the report says correlates consistently with safer workplaces. One example is our LIFE programme, which ensures tough, consistent controls to prevent life-changing incidents or fatalities. It focuses on the most serious risks such as work at height, fire, driving, and working with electrical supplies. The 270 corporate requirements devised to curb LIFE risks were drawn up by our EHS directors. These rules are mandated for all sites, and campaigns are run regularly to maintain workers’ focus on the risks. LIFE compliance across the whole organisation is closely monitored and promoted by our senior leaders.
Active monitoring is enabled by ensuring EHS indicators, including incident rates, near-misses, MESUR visits and SIO suggestions received, are uploaded monthly by all locations to a central database for analysis by regional EHS Directors and then by the corporate EHS team for reporting to the company’s senior leaders. Our EHS Risk and Culture audit programme assesses manufacturing sites, distribution centres, research facilities and administrative offices periodically to verify that hazard controls are robust and to monitor the safety culture maturity and quality of local leadership.
Our belief in, and internal evidence of, the value of a structured approach to safety leadership led us to develop an external Leadership and Safety Culture training programme for our plant managers and other non-safety leaders, hosted by the CEDEP leadership development college. From its inception we ensured the programme was open to leaders from other companies and it has since grown into a distinct division of CEDEP: the International Institute of Leadership and Safety Culture.
We put a high priority on strong, visible safety leadership in L’Oréal because we believe it is the engine of high performance. It’s no surprise to see that belief supported by the evidence in this report.
In this blog, Giulia Maistrello, Senior Analyst at RAND Europe introduces the findings from two new reports. These reports underpin the Global Safety Evidence Centre’s new evidence programme on safe work, exploring both the evidence needs of safety practitioners and the evidence currently available to support them.
A blog from Padmini Ravi, Project Manager – Risk Know-How, Sense about Science.
Dr. Sarah Jenkins and Dr. Andrea Taylor discuss the integration of the Poll with data on vulnerabilities, governance, and long-term climate projections to identify predictors of disaster risk perception and preparedness, and develop early warning and risk communication strategies.
