Unlike other business drivers, safety can be a value that does not change with business priorities.
Introducing “HSEQ Career Column” with Olawale Ogunyebi.
The HSEQ Career Column is a weekly article series written by Olawale Ogunyebi, a DuPont Master Coach, Besafe Super Trainer and a former Africa Regional Safety Operations Manager (Unilever). He is presently the Managing Partner at MTC ENT. Dev. Limited. The purpose of this series is to mentor entry-level and struggling HSEQ professionals, narrating and drawing out lessons from the writer’s real-life experiences in the safety industry. Catch up with the posts you’ve missed HERE.
HSE As A Key Business Value Driver
Unlike other business drivers, safety can be a value that does not change with business priorities.
Its power is in the way employees easily identify good safety with management’s care and concern.
Perceived management care and concern will in turn “drive employee commitment to one another and the business, discretionary effort, feelings of contributing to something bigger than yourself,
Fulfilment and job satisfaction, open communication, loyalty and ownership” according to Simon Axup.
Paul Henry O’Neill served as the 72nd Secretary of the Treasury for part of President George W. Bush’s first term.
Prior to his term as Secretary of the Treasury, O’Neill was chairman and CEO of Pittsburgh -based industrial giant Alcoa from 1987 to 1999.
He retired as chairman at the end of 2000.
At the beginning of his tenure, O’Neill encountered significant resistance from the Board of Directors due to his stance on prioritizing worker safety.
Many of the shareholders of Alcoa sold their shares as a protest.
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“On his first day, he told Alcoa’s executives that they weren’t going to talk people into buying more aluminium and that they weren’t going to be able to raise prices, so the only way to improve the company’s fortunes was to lower its costs…
…and the only way to do that was with the cooperation of Alcoa’s workers…
…and the only way to get that was to show them that you actually cared about them…
…and the only way to do that was to actually care about them…
…and the way to do that was to establish, as the first priority of Alcoa, the elimination of all job-related injuries’’
Then he added for an effect that “Any executive who didn’t make worker safety his personal fetish – a higher priority than profits – would be fired.”
Paul Henry O’Neill later went on not only to improve Alcoa’s safety record, but the company’s market value increased from $3 billion in 1986 to $27.53 billion in 2000.
While net income increased from $200million to $1.484 billion. That is the transformative power of safety.
An effective HSE Manager must see himself as a transformational leader.
He must understand the business and the key drivers and help his top leaders to see safety as a business value driver.
He must also leverage the strategic power of top management, the influence of line management and the power of total employee engagement to drive organizational transformation.
