1.  Comcare Conference Canberra 2004

2. Safety Training Vs Education, Longwall News 2003.

3. Taking a World View of OHS - Safety Institute Conference 2006

4.  Leadership: Selling in

OHS people often face a competitive market within their own organisations, writes John Ninness.

In the past decade or two, pressure has been growing on managers and leaders in a changing business world. They are now expected to perform not only their traditional roles of organising and controlling, but also to develop knowledge across a wide variety of complex disciplines.

Occupational health and safety, while clearly critical to the wellbeing and success of organisations, can be diminished or lost amid other concerns.

At the same time, research has found the factors influencing OHS decisions of managers and leaders include individuals’ overall attitudes, stakeholder expectations, knowledge of modern safety practice, and underlying cultural, psychological, social and environmental issues.

Successful OHS practitioners appreciate that all these factors can influence a leader’s interpretation of their safety management role. In a phrase, the practitioners find out where their leaders are coming from as the starting point for influencing safety culture.

Senior management roles, decisions and methods are often based on an individual’s subjective view of what is required. To achieve more objectivity, many leading organisations add safety accountability to position descriptions, job instructions and setting performance indicators at both individual and corporate level. It has largely proven successful in reducing lost-time injury rates (even if some have been doctored to meet projected results).

Consider this extreme example of a senior manager. William moved to Australia 10 years ago from a third world country where he had worked in operational roles for a decade. He has held a number of supervisory positions in Australia and was recently promoted to leadership because of his technical excellence and hard work. He is now ultimately responsible for the safety of an entire department and a safety practitioner reports to him.
The selection criteria for his position did not include safety performance. He has never been held accountable for it before, and industrial safety is not a recognised field in his former country.

It would be well worth considering what preconceived views William might have.
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OHS practitioners are competing for management commitment and availability in the way that organisations compete for market share. Among the competitors are departments dealing with human resources, environmental and legal concerns, and quality control. In many organisations, these functions are grouped together (often called “cost centres”), with a functional head such as an HR or corporate services manager appointed as overseer.

With information filtering to senior management through departmental heads whose bias is elsewhere, OHS can get less attention than it deserves. Ideally, OHS people should report directly to senior management, which also speeds up the process.

OHS can also compete more indirectly with finance, logistics, marketing, property and operations. With management’s attention generally focused on operations and profit, certain support functions can get pushed to the end of the queue.

So OHS practitioners must sometimes perform as marketers in their own organisation, devising strategies that target management, stakeholders and workers—their “target markets”.

Like people in any market, different managers have different styles and “buying patterns”. With a technocratic leader, for example, it would be wise to weight the marketing towards technical matters. You might instigate discussion on the ways technology and OHS integrate.

Reading books specifically about marketing can be a great help. Another tip is to list 10 words you think describe your manager, along with 10 ways you might market your services to appeal to these traits.

In many cases, the need to market OHS to management is continual.
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Henry Ford said, “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

The full-length article appeared in the May 04 issue of National Safety, pp26-29.
John Ninness is a Principal Consultant for Ninness Consulting Pty Ltd. This paper is an edited version of his presentation to the 2003 Safety in Action conference.