Safety focus can unlock high performance

A workplace culture focused on safety can be the secret sauce in high-performing energy projects. This is the view of the Energy Networks Association’s Jamie Reeve, who discusses how an integrated approach to health, safety and the environment can deliver real benefits and efficiencies.

A focus on safety is a fundamental part of the energy sector’s DNA as you don’t get second chances when it comes to energy infrastructure.

When we look at leading energy organisations across the globe, we can see how they take this focus further, to embed it into their workplace cultures.

At this year’s ENA SHE Management Conference in Dublin, we will be exploring how instilling a workplace culture that prioritises health and safety, and an individual’s responsibility for ensuring it, can be an essential part of a high-performance corporate culture. We’ll be looking at how to move beyond a simple focus on procedures, to examine how organisational leadership and business priorities can be aligned to safety culture and a wider consideration of an organisation’s environmental impact. Finally, we’ll look at how a culture focused on safety can help deliver staff satisfaction, unlock efficiencies and accelerate your organisations net zero transition.

To properly discuss safety, health and the environment, you must bring in everything, not just procedures and standards, but also best practice for occupational health, sustainability management and environmental health. By integrating these practices and disciplines, top performing organisations have seen real benefits to operational outcomes and cashable efficiency savings, but it doesn’t stop there.

An integrated approach can help network operators optimise their asset management, inspire their teams by showing how seriously businesses take their safety, reduce absence due to health issues and help ensure the seismic changes needed to deliver net zero are delivered without expensive revisions by helping to de-risk schemes.

An effective approach to leadership on safety, health and environmental topics used to be top down, with managers simply ensuring strict adherence to clear rules. Today, we know it’s most effective to make staff feel ownership of safety and environmental health processes, via workforce consultation and engagement, and by transparently showing the results, to ensure safety processes are the most effective they can be.

Safety is one area of workplace relations where there is often a clear consensus, and one where trade unions are particularly valued partners. At the SHE conference, we’ll learn how the consultative approach led to successful skill development programmes, the adoption of employee led initiatives, co-designed programmes to improve employee health in and outside of work and how companywide campaigns on safety, health and environmental issues benefited both staff and the wider community.

You don’t get far at any level of the energy sector unless you care about safety, so it’s natural that if you create ways in which all staff can understand your business’ safety priorities and those of the wider world, people step up to the challenge of improving outcomes and delivering safety initiatives. To ensure support, organisations need to convey how these initiatives benefit staff, their families, consumers, communities and even the UK as a whole.

You know you are succeeding when you can read across from your environmental health plans or project safety briefs, and can show clearly how they are having a real impact to the people delivering them.

These days you also don’t get far in the sector unless you are also in the business of strategic innovation, and we’ve seen how vital properly integrated safety and environmental health best practice is to the net zero transition.