Introduction:

Occupational safety and health (OSH) review is defined by Goetsch (2019) as a systematic evaluation of workplace health and safety policies, procedures, and performance to identify risks and ensure regulatory compliance. It is essential. Organisations’ leaders should conduct a review at least once a year to ensure the principles of safety are established, workers’ involvement is prioritized, and the system effectively protects at-risk individuals.

Performance review has many objectives, such as:

1. Determine whether current health and safety performance is acceptable.
2. Verify if the health and safety management system is being followed, using non-conformance reports from internal/external audits.
3. Ensure legal compliance: A review identifies gaps in regulatory adherence.
4. Assess alignment with standards: Reviewing performance data highlights weaknesses in compliance.
5. Drive continuous improvement through iterative refinements.
6. Enable effective responses to operational or regulatory changes.
7. Foster organizational learning by analyzing lessons learned.

Inputs to the health and safety management performance review:

1. Internal & External Audits Reports:

Auditing aims to gather objective evidence (or as objective as possible) to assess whether the current safety and health management approach aligns with the organisation’s policies and objectives. It is a critical performance review input because it helps locate gaps in the management system, which can then be reviewed and corrected.

2. Inspections Reports:

Workplace inspections verify that equipment, practices, and the work environment are safe and compliant. They are a priority input for performance reviews because they identify issues before harm occurs, enabling timely intervention by responsible personnel.

3. Incident/Near-Miss information and investigations Reports:

Incidents and near-misses are reactive indicators of safety performance, revealing weaknesses in existing systems. They are critical inputs because they highlight failure trends and root causes. When a company uses incident data in performance reviews, it can prevent recurrence.

4.Compliance with legislation:

Legal compliance is usually one of organisational major goal because it directly affects its credibility and reputation as well as financial capability. It is valuable performance review input because it works on preventing fines and legal violation penalties while promoting standards adherence.

5. Voice of Worker:

Another input to performance review is the issues raised by workers or their representatives that have been recorded during the period being reviewed. Workers’ feedback is a required by ISO standards because it is improves workers buy-in and engagement. The workers participation should be reviewed in order to ensure our procedures are relevant to them and can be implemented to achieve our safety goals.

6. Risk Assessment Updates:

Risk assessment is a live document. The evolving nature of workplaces causes new risks to arise and new control measure developed. Reviewing risk assessment helps organisation in controlling new risk proactively and reduce it so far as is reasonably practicable. Above that, reviewing risk assessment can prevent complacency which produce a false feeling of confidence and lead to wrong assumption.

7. Training records:

Training ensures that workers can do their task safely and they possess the required skills & knowledge to perform the work as required. There is a direct relation between the level of training and the accident rate at workplaces, and that is the reason for considering training records and a vital input for safety performance review. Not to mention that the provision of sufficient training is a legal requirement.

Take away:

Health and safety performance review is a leadership role in organisations’, which can work as continuous improvement tool toward a safe work place. In this article I covered seven inputs for better review in your organisation, but there is more than that to consider. For instance, other active and reactive monitoring can provide additional insight toward the review output. Benchmarking could be a good input as well, because it can give information to compare your performance with other similar companies.

References:

• INDG417  Leading health and safety at work - HSE UK
• HSG65   Managing for health and safety - HSE UK
• ILO-OSH 2001