SHEQ Culture and Climate

SHEQ Culture and Climate

As many of you may know South Africa has been in the grip of severe weather conditions for the past two years, many would say that it has been caused by El Nino. The term El Niño refers to the large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to periodic warming in sea surface temperatures across the central and east-central Equatorial Pacific. This prevailing system causes severe weather conditions all over the world from Floods in England, Australia to drought in Southern Africa.

This brings me to the topic of the blog for this week. In many cases, prevailing attitudes and approaches from leadership will have a direct impact on the SHEQ Culture & Climate of the organisation. Not great when something external of your control influences and impacts your life.

What type of effect does your SHEQ system or the organisations people have on the climate and culture of your company? Are there floods of accidents? Is there a drought of passion for compliance, a general sense of apathy towards protecting, people and the planet?

Two of the indicators I look for when evaluating the prevailing SHEQ Culture and Climate of any organisation:

1. Leadership

Having audited many Organisations across Africa, the leadership style of a management team is a great barometer of how effective the SHEQ system will be. Despite the fact that SHEQ compliance is undoubtedly a team effort, people will in many cases follow the example of the leaders (good or bad). If the leaders don’t care about SHEQ compliance, neither will the staff, if all people see is lip service, then that’s all their gonna give.

2. Participation & ownership by all employees

If you have a close look at the intention behind many of the ISO standards requirements and various OHS legal requirements, they have a strong emphasis on consultation, communication and participation i.e. everyone should be playing the game for an effective outcome. Where systems are run from the top down with little worker involvement or participation, or leaders pay lip service to SHEQ compliance, this will not foster the environment for a positive culture and the climate.

So what do we need to create a positive SHEQ Culture and Climate?

Well, let’s look at the needs and expectations of the various stakeholders.

1. Management – As they have a fiduciary duty to their employees and shareholders, managers need to demonstrate that the SHEQ system is performing as required – So they need a live helicopter view of system performance.

2. Supervisors – They need to drive and ensure multiple compliance activities across the entire organisation, now that’s one mammoth task.

• Management can log into the system and get a live helicopter of the organisations SHEQ performance.
• Supervisors can drive all of their compliance activities through the events module and upload evidence for management to review performance.
• Operators have access to the system where all operational procedures are stored. They can report risks, accidents and improvements and thus participate in the improvement of their companies SHEQ performance.

Wouldn’t you like to ensure a positive and effective SHEQ management Culture and Climate in your Organisation?

Why not give us a call and ask one of our skilled consultants to demonstrate how Mango makes compliance easy, whilst meeting the needs and expectations of the various SHEQ system stakeholders.

USE SHEQ SOFTWARE TO ACHIEVE OBJECTIVES

We utilised Mango Software Compliance to input our company objectives.  Consequently, each employee had access to the objectives whenever they wanted to look at them.  SRM and many of our clients use Mango Compliance Software –

www.mangolive.com  Mango makes it easier to get ISO 9001:2015 certification.