Occupational safety and Health Benchmarking is a process/tool used by an organisation to assess the differences between its occupational safety and health performance/processes, and those of other leading organisations. Those leading organisations should have a better performance in this regard than ours. It is a well-recognised tool for discovering best practices, improving performance, continuous learning, and support decision making.
This process involves, awareness of self-safety processes and procedure awareness, analysing other companies processes to learn from them, then applying their best practices in our organisation after tailoring them to suit us and to reach their level. Benchmarking aim to produce development plans as an element of monitoring and assessment occupational safety and health technique.
Historically, the modern benchmarking was practically initiated/applied in the United States by Xerior company, and was aimed to understand how to compete with leading and successful Japanese counterparts in early 70s.
This article represents what I believe to be, the three particularly critical success factor for effective benchmarking of occupational safety and health performance, which are: the leadership role of commitment, to understanding existing management system, then finding a reliable date and partner for the benchmarking.
1-management leadership and stakeholder engagement:
Benchmarking success is built upon the organisation’s management involvement and stakeholder engagement. Management that demonstrates commitment to high OHS performance, continuous learning and its core safety values establishes occupational safety and health objectives and works for them. Adequate benchmarking requires management commitment in terms of providing resources, time and money, and being willing to apply benchmarking outcomes. OHS Benchmarking is carried out by people to reduce accidents and ill health, improve compliance with the law and to reduce compliance costs (HSE. INDG 301 1999 C250), Involving internal stakeholders such as sponsors, managers, workers and external stakeholders like the supply chain and contractors is important to promote ownership of benchmarking and contribute to its success.
It is important for the organisation management and its team to recognise the role of occupational safety and health in the organisation development, then to believe that benchmarking is the right process or tool to achieve these developments. Without management commitment, the benchmarking team will not find a suitable foundation to rely their efforts on. As the management does not take benchmarking project seriously, the employees will definitely not, and that will produce impractical results. The management commitment entails having a clear safety objective, involving safety and health in organisations decision making and providing the required resources for Benchmarking programme , and lead by example (OSHA 3885 Oct. 2016).
2-Comprehensive understanding of our existing general & O H S management system and its current performance:
Before conducting benchmarking with an external partner, it is necessary to develop a deep understanding of our current safety and health processes and documents. Not only statistics on occupational management system performance measurements, which include accidents, near-miss and ill-health reporting, safety inspections, audits, and more, but also the organisation’s management system processes such as organisation policies and procedures, communication protocols, training, performance indicators, and decision making. For a successful and effective benchmarking of occupational safety and health management performance, we must measure our system and understand our product and services, find out if benchmarking will be cost effective, and what the benefits we can achieve considering our existing system situation.
For successful benchmarking it is essential to comprehend current occupational health and safety processes and procedure that led to the current positive and negative performance. Processes such as safety inspections, incidents reporting, method statements, job safety analysis, permit to work, compliance with legal requirement, training programmes and so on. We can decompose processes and tasks to its fundamental components, which will make a significant different in finding gaps. There are several methods to analyse the processes such as process mapping, simulation, flawchart, and mind mapping. Using different techniques can result in better insights and profound results. In OHS, it is true that workers know how a task is carried out in practice, and know the processes and know each of the steps, while management staff may not, so their representatives must participate in the process analysis and management system understanding; for benchmarking purposes (Dale H. Besterfield et al., 2012), another reason for that is to promote their ownership of the benchmarking outcome and their implementations.
3-Finding a reliable information/data and selecting a proper partner:
It is a critical success factor for benchmarking to be built upon factual information to provide the aimed result of change; this information should come from a well selected benchmarking partner, who has better practices, where we can obtain the valid OHS data/performance to against our own. The reliable data can be collected by observation, questioners or documents surveys from partners organisation, while considering confidentiality and code of ethics.
We should consider whether to choose an internal (partner within organisation) and external (partner outside organisation) benchmarking partners, furthermore, the partner can be cross industry, the latter option can be beneficial to avoiding competitors and intersections with the code of ethics in confidentiality of data and reports. Based on Worksafe Australia: Benchmarking Occupational Health and Safety, June 1996 stated that ‘’ Some enterprises reported significant ‘break through’ change as a result of benchmarking externally to their industry’’.
Take Away:
Organisations should keep working on identifying their gaps and weaknesses in its processes, procedures, and performance with regard to safety and health, because of continuous change in the standards, legislations, technology and innovations. Benchmarking technique can be one of the organisation’s continuous improvement arsenals because it seeks best practices internally and externally. Above that, it helps in improving safety and health performance and reducing number incidents
OHS benchmarking : Occupational health and safety benchmarking critical success factors.