Helping boards be a catalyst for better health and safety outcomes

Boards make a difference to health and safety performance. The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) recognised this and included duties for “officers” to effectively oversee health and safety in their organisations. “Officers” includes board members and others who govern organisations.

Earlier this year, the Better Governance of Health and Safety project (the Better Governance project) found that health and safety governance has not been the catalyst for the system and performance change that was anticipated. This has not happened sufficiently to have the intended impact on health and safety outcomes in companies and other organisations.

The report identified there was a compliance‑based approach driven by boards and other officers focused primarily on protecting themselves from prosecution. This contrasted with the aspiration of the legislation, which was to drive changes in governance practice that led to improved worker health and safety outcomes.

Future vision

The Better Governance Project has framed a future vision for health and safety governance, being “capable leaders integrating health and safety into curious and courageous governance discussions and decisions that are context-rich and demonstrate care for workers”.

It centres on the following principles for directors and boards:

1. Courageous: creating a leadership environment of honesty, transparency and learning, and acknowledging we don’t always have the answers.
2. Capable: continuously developing our knowledge of health and safety governance.
3. Curious: seeking insights on how work is prioritised, planned, resourced, completed and experienced in the organisation.
4. Context: understanding the internal and external factors which affect the work in the organisation and scanning the horizon to understand what’s coming next which may affect it.
5. Care: our approach to health and safety governance starts with recognising that our people are our organisation’s greatest asset.

The Better Governance Project findings summary has more detailed information on this vision and principles.

WorkSafe have confirmed that this vision and principles reflect current best practice in health and safety governance.

A first step in realising this vision is to ensure that directors and boards have a touchstone for improved health and safety governance. Our Health and safety governance guide developed with WorkSafe (the “blue book”) focuses primarily on what directors and boards need to do to comply with their health and safety obligations.

The Better Governance project has prompted work on an updated guide that is more focused on how health and safety governance is undertaken to achieve improved outcomes. The updated guide will include an example of a governance “persona” (including how to develop one).

The guide will highlight how directors and boards can enable organisational resilience and positive health and safety outcomes through better anticipation of health and safety risks, monitoring and mitigating those risks, and learning from the outcomes achieved.

This was identified as a high priority to ensure that directors can improve health and safety governance in their organisations through insights into:

• their organisation’s critical and strategic risks, and how those risks are being effectively mitigated and managed
• the performance of their systems, policies and processes; are they known about, followed, successful, or needing work?
• what additional controls might be available, and why they are not being used within their organisation or by their partners
• the way work is done and how it varies from health and safety policies, and why; is the variation healthy, safe innovation or is it risky?

The Institute of Directors (IoD), WorkSafe, the Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum and the General Managers Safety Forum are working together to publish an updated guide in early 2024.