Prescient research on OHS, values and sustainability

It has become fashionable to place occupational health and safety (OHS) in the organisational context of business sustainability.  But this is not a new phenomenon in Australia.  In 2001 the Ecos Corporation published a discussion paper called “Safety + Value: Entry Points for Operationalizing Sustainability.”* It states

“A dual focus on safety and value creation provides familiar and readily understandable “entry points” and “drivers” for corporations seeking to operationalize sustainability as a framework for doing business in the 21st Century.”

First of all, even this opening statement is not “readily understandable”.  “Value creation” is a common project management term at the moment  that emphasises the need for an action to create value.  This is like being “pro-active”.  The status quo is stagnant and advocates need to differentiate what they want to do from the moribund (in)action of the status quo.  Progress has always been so but there is an implicit criticism of existing circumstances. The reality is that it is the slow pace of change that is the main source of the frustration and call for change.  It is not enough to be active, we must be pro-active.

It is also important to consider the level of value one wants to achieve.  Most business activity creates value but many people want a lot of value.  This could be amenity, this could be profits,  it could be political gain, it could be glory!  One of the aims of sustainability seems to be trying to achieve a balance between often competing factors – a little like achieving growth through consensus as Australia did in the 1980s, particularly under the Prime Ministership of Bob Hawke, a former trade union leader.

A major problem with this push for rapid change is that what came before is often seen as wrong, deficient or heading in the wrong direction.  We are seeing this at the moment in the “safety differently” movement in Australia which also fits with the current political push for “innovation” and “agility”.  This type of approach can be divisive largely because of the implied criticism of the history of safety.  Those “old guard” who have worked their entire lives pushing for safety improvements feel as if their efforts, and their pace, are being questioned.

The authors of the Ecos paper – Paul Gilding, Rick Humphries and Murray Hogarth – argue that safety has the ability to cut through the fuzziness of sustainability by providing a focus but also by humanising sustainability. They say that safety can provide a continuum based around three points:

“Entry Point – Meet the business challenge of delivering superior workplace health and safety

Checkpoint – aim for “sustainable (or safe) growth” as a mid-step on the path to sustainability

Aspiration Point – a quest for sustainability drives the progression like the search for the holy grail”

The continuum is a useful and simple structure for generating thought and seems to fit with Patrick Hudson’s organisational  maturity model.  It also clearly splits the achievable from the aspirational and most companies would be satisfied in achieving the elements in the bottom half of the chart.

Gilding, Humphries and Hogarth mention the pace of change in their paper’s abstract.

“Sustainability-seeking companies need to crawl before they walk, and walk before they can run, meaning that getting workplace health and safety right is a comfortable and constructive jumping off point for the sustainable journey.”

They also mention the need to maintain a focus on the core purpose of OHS – the saving of lives. This reflects the current push for putting the H (Human) back into OHS.  They write:

“Any company with significant safety issues that lacks the managerial and broader organizational skills and attitudes to develop and maintain a successful health and safety culture – one that save lives and averts human misery caused by preventable accidents and exposures in the workplace – also will fail or at least struggle to operationalize sustainability with its many and often greater challenges.”

This is useful in several other ways.  It talks of leadership without mentioning it.  In fact, the whole paper hardly mentions leadership which makes the paper easier to understand and makes the ideas more relevant by not focussing on the actions or attitudes of the C-suite.  A more sustainable thought process perhaps?

The authors provide an appendix of more things to do and include a list of what they knew in 2001:

• “Safety has social, environmental and financial and economic aspects, as does the far broader area of sustainability
• The early business response to sustainability-type expectations was to group workplace safety and health and environment together under the control of SHE professionals
• The effectiveness of these SHE professionals, especially as agents to drive sustainability, is often restricted within corporations because their role is not seen as part of core business and they are ill-equipped to make the value case
• The concept of operationalizing sustainability is very challenging for corporations” (page 11)

Part of the reason in bringing this paper to the attention of readers is to show that the situation they may be facing now was flagged at least as early as 2001.

The paper also included “what we need to find out”:

• “Can the deliberate development of a safety “culture” or “core value” within a corporation help to guide it towards sustainability?
• Would linking to core values other than safety – for example quality, shareholder value or customer value – also work as an entry point and driver for sustainability?
• Does operational excellence on safety at the day-to-day level translate into greater capacity to deal with extraordinary crises?
• Does the combination of a focus on safety and a focus on value creation work in real company situations as Ecos has proposed, and does it work across all sectors?
• Where would current sustainability/corporate responsibility leadership companies be placed on the safety-sustainability continuum?”

These questions are as relevant now as they were in 2001. This is sad but also indicates what forward thinkers Gilding, Humphries and Hogarth were.

Kevin Jones

For those who can access academic papers, a fuller version of the paper was published in Corporate Environmental Strategy, Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2002, Pages 390–397