JANENCO            Health, Safety & Environmental Consultants

Founded & Managed by Jan H Labuschagne

[ Nebosh International Diploma | Nebosh Oil & Gas |

  Nebosh Construction | Nebosh Environmental]

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I would like to take the opportunity to express a personal view on Safety. I believe that Safety is about people not statistics, with this view in mind Safety is about visible leadership and the courage to hold our people openly accountable for performance.
The development of a robust and rigorous Safety & Environment Management System is about providing the framework to support the continuous improvement process and documenting the desired outcomes to ensure due diligence and risk mitigation.
The Management Team are the leaders, and it is vital that we equip these leaders with the skills, accountabilities and belief that “Zero Harm” is believable and achievable, and the leaders support the organisation as it moves through the cultural change curve with an emphasis on continuous improvement.
I hold the view that we need to be pro-active in our approach by introducing standards that support legislative requirements and industry best practice. These standards need to be documented and supported by clearly defined expectations and accountabilities for all people in the organisation. The standards need to focus on high risk areas within the organisation and be directed at using error mitigation and error trapping strategies in conjunction with proactive behaviour-based process to reduce and control exposure to injury, equipment damage and loss of production.
The introduction of pro-active key performance indicators such as inspections, audits, incident investigations, safety observations and a procedure to ensure timely closure of non-compliance issues can set the expectation that we will not accept sub-standard practices or at risk behaviours as a way of conducting our business. In this sense, we can take the opportunity to make safety an integral part of our operations and a results-driven safety culture by the people accountable for managing the workplace.