Help Your CEO "Get" Safety

On Tuesday, June 25, during Safety 2013, Terrie S. Norris, CSP, risk control manager with Bickmore Risk Services & Consulting in Orange, CA, and ASSE's 2011-12 President, spoke about "The Evolution of Safety: What Your CEO Should Know."

Just how can SH&E professionals help their CEOs? Here's some advice from Norris (based on her proceedings article):

• Help the CEO and upper management understand management’s role in establishing a prevention culture. "First, the safety professional must understand the company’s strategic plan and determine where safety, health and prevention fit within that plan as a strategic partner," Norris explains. "It is only through understanding where these functions fit that the safety professional can convince the CEO and upper management that safety, health and prevention are part of the strategic plan and not an expendable operational expense."

• Guide the CEO in "agendizing" safety. "The CEO will look to the safety and health professional to provide the materials to be examined at the staff meeting, to explain the reports and provide recommendations for solutions that include the return on investment data," Norris says. "To meet these informational needs, the SH&E professional must examine the tracked and untracked costs associated with losses and determine how best to track and report them.

• Educate the CEO about regulatory compliance issues. "The larger the geographic area in which the company operates the more information the safety and health professional must be able to supply to the CEO." Norris cautions, however: "The purpose of educating the CEO is not to try to scare them into regulatory compliance. CEOs are entrepreneurs and risk-takers by nature. Regulatory compliance is way down on their list of worries. It is important to educate them regarding how to use the regulations as a framework for basis of a prevention culture, then how to go beyond compliance for increased profitability."

So what's an SH&E professional's best strategy? "Help your CEO understand the importance of their leadership in prevention and the benefits of establishing and maintaining a prevention culture," Norris concludes.

Norris's Safety 2013 session was sponsored by UL Workplace Health and Safety.