Today`s CEOs are increasingly focusing on governance in their businesses, and have become adept at putting in place systems that protect themselves and their companies against a multitude of risks, including financial, operational and occupational hazards.
Although most of the day-to-day activities in an organisation are delegated, the CEO is required to take all reasonable steps to ensure the correct implementation of legislation in the business.
The Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Act of 1993 was promulgated to regulate and ensure safety standards in hazardous environments. The OHS Act is very specific in its requirement that there is a single person (usually the CEO) who is accountable for the implementation of the Act. Even though the CEO can delegate duties to any person in the company (Section 16.2), ultimate accountability and legal liability rests with the CEO.
However, CEOs find themselves in a precarious position. While they remain responsible, it is most often artisans and plant personnel who are exposed to safety-related risks and who have to make daily decisions and judgements with safety implications. If people in the plants make the wrong judgement, accidents can happen, leading to injury or even fatalities. The CEO`s position is an unenviable one. He must try to ensure the risk of accidents is minimised by ensuring these day-to-day decisions (which are out of his direct control) are taken correctly.
Some of the tools available to management to achieve this goal include established management systems (eg ISO 14000), training of personnel (staff and contractors), and modifications to processes, plant and equipment (in order to engineer out certain hazards). Aligned with all of these activities should be a strong safety culture, which allows good delegated decisions to be taken on the plant within a strong and supportive system of management control.
The CEO`s position is an unenviable one.
Gavin Halse, MD, ApplyIT
In industry, over the years, several procedures have been established to regulate abnormal and hazardous work. These established practices ensure the principles of the act are implemented at each instance where hazardous work takes place. An example of a key process is the preparation, issue, execution and closure of a permit to work (or clearance). Commonly this is a paper-based system which has limited scope for external monitoring for compliance and is vulnerable to inconsistent application by the operating staff due to differing levels of skill, training and supervision.
Computer-based permit-to-work systems have the potential to allow employers to regulate hazardous activities, and by capturing organisational best practice, ensure safety procedures are consistently followed regardless of the skill level of the staff involved. A properly designed system will include a comprehensive audit trail and have security features that prevent unauthorised changes. It will combine the rigour of a well-designed and flexible IT system with the practical elements of day-to-day operations. It should be designed in accordance with both management system principles and the requirements of legislation. For example, it should allow exceptions under controlled circumstances and include a reporting mechanism that allows management to investigate deviations from set procedures. Based on these exceptions, a process to continuously improve procedures and rules for safe work can then be implemented.
Any IT-based safety system should have been extensively proven in a number of industrial environments over many years and have a sound implementation methodology. Cheap and cheerful in-house developments can seldom match such criteria. The system should be architected to take into account the fact that safety systems are often plant-specific. Hazards and rules for safe work often differ between business units and plants for very good reasons, and an ill advised system that is imposed at a distance from corporate level may actually worsen safety practices at plant level because users abdicate responsibility to the system. System performance should be a key criterion; plant operations personnel do not take kindly to the slow, cumbersome systems typically found on the Web. The architecture should furthermore allow for plant level integration into other systems such as process control, site access control and human resource systems.
The use of biometrics such as fingerprint scanning system can also reliably validate permit issuers and receivers, thereby ensuring that only persons who have been suitably trained and approved can use the system.
To conform with legislation, management needs the assurance that everything practical is being done to ensure the safety of people working in hazardous environments. By implementing a robust and reliable computer-based system regulating operational safety, the CEO can delegate safety-related decisions to the appropriate level in the organisation with the confidence of knowing that best-practice procedures are being universally followed, as evidenced by secure, auditable records.
The value of such a system extends far beyond the simple replacement of paper with an electronic system; it addresses the key elements of culture, governance and accountability and gives the CEO a unique tool to ensure his legal and leadership obligations around operational safety have been demonstrably addressed.
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