When I look at the landscape of health and safety today in the United States and globally, it reminds me of a Henry Ford quote I heard long ago: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” How do we create a sense of urgency with leaders to take on the responsibility of prevention when their thoughts are driven by the financial burden of the health and well-being of their workers?

In June 2014, UL sponsored a two-day Leadership Roundtable in collaboration with the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University and the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) at the University of California, Berkeley. A diverse group of thought leaders, experts, and executives explored this issue and are providing a roadmap that will help organizations improve outcomes rather than continue to compound the problem.

The participants collectively identified seven necessary conditions that must exist in organizations to achieve and sustain health and safety integration:

1. Use a holistic approach: Align safety and health; they are not disparate functions. Design initiatives to incorporate both health protection (safety) and health promotion (well-being).
2. Make a commitment: Position integrated health and safety activities as key contributors to an organization’s value system and sustainability, not as a cost of doing business.
3. Present the business case: Express value in terms senior executives understand. Adopt common terminology for key performance indicators. Senior executives need empirical evidence to justify an investment in comprehensive workplace health and safety programs. Reduce ambiguity.
4. Create an overarching management structure: Create lines of authority and reporting to encourage effective communication among all parties. When safety, health and risk management report to different department, competing priorities, resource constraints, logistical challenges and cultural barriers can impede collaboration.
5. Prepare for a new profession: Incorporate health and safety concepts in business courses and introduce more business management concepts into environment, health and safety (EH&S) education. Redefine professional roles and responsibilities to better meet current and anticipated business, safety and health management needs and trends.
6. Support a culture of continuous learning: An organization must shift its focus from past accidents (lagging indicators) to include behaviors and conditions that create risk (leading indicators). By looking for deviations and responding with vigilance, organizations can stimulate meaningful changes in systems and processes that help reduce the likelihood of accidents.
7. Get everyone involved: The involvement of the entire organization has a huge impact on performance improvement. The more successes can be measured and reported, the more holistic response by management.

As occupational health and safety experts, we face a huge challenge. Ideally, the framework for change presented in the eBookThrough the Eyes of the Executive, Creating a Healthier and Safer Workforce will result in the next big thing for health and safety – the thing that helps all organizations, regardless of the path their journey takes, to achieve excellence and ensure improvements are sustainable for generations to come both in the United States and abroad.

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