3. Check: monitor and report your performance
Monitoring and reporting are vital parts of a health and safety culture. Management systems must allow the board to receive both specific (for example incident-led) and routine reports on the performance of health and safety policy.
Much day-to-day health and safety information needs be reported only at the time of a formal review. But only a strong system of monitoring can ensure that the formal review can proceed as planned – and that relevant events in the interim are brought to the board's attention.
Auditing and reporting
Larger public and private sector organisations should have formal procedures for auditing and reporting health and safety performance.
The board should ensure that any audit is perceived as a positive management and boardroom tool. It should have unrestricted access to both external and internal auditors, keeping their cost-effectiveness, independence and objectivity under review.
Core actions
The board should ensure that:
- appropriate weight is given to reporting both preventive information (such as progress of training and maintenance programmes) and incident data (such as accident and sickness absence rates)
- periodic audits of the effectiveness of management structures and risk controls for health and safety are carried out
- the impact of changes such as the introduction of new procedures, work processes or products, or any major health and safety failure, is reported to them as soon as possible
- there are procedures to implement new and changed legal requirements and to consider other external developments and events
How it can be done
- Effective monitoring of sickness absence and workplace health can alert the board to underlying problems that could seriously damage performance or result in accidents and long-term illness
- The collection of workplace health and safety data can allow the board to benchmark the organisation's performance against others in its sector
- Appraisals of senior managers can include an assessment of their contribution to health and safety performance
- Boards can receive regular reports on the health and safety performance and actions of contractors
- Some organisations have found they win greater support for health and safety by involving workers[4] in monitoring
Case studies
You can find case studies of leading on health and safety[5].
Checklist
Our leadership checklist[6] will help you ask the right questions in assessing whether you are leading on health and safety effectively.