How can we transform health, safety and wellbeing to be future fit?

The pandemic has demonstrated that health, safety and wellbeing (HSW) needs to be more agile, focused, simpler and integrated into the way business is done.

In brief

• COVID-19 has drawn our attention to the existing long-standing challenges associated with traditional approaches to HSW.
• The new HSW practices adopted during the pandemic were more practical and better aligned to the operations and risk profile of each organisation.
• HSW has a unique opportunity to make a giant leap forward by continuing and building on the function’s new ways of operating.

COVID-19 forced organisations to rethink HSW on the fly, revealing the inadequacies of the HSW systems on which Australian and New Zealand businesses rely.

In the last two years, HSW visionaries who recognised that blindly following the system wasn’t going to cut it, adopted agile new practices – practices that were simpler, more flexible, more connected to business and only focused on critical risks, practices that have proved to be substantially more suitable for our fast-paced and complex working world.

In the aftermath, HSW professionals began to ask themselves: “Why didn’t we make these changes before?”

To help the profession continue its transformation momentum, EY conducted interviews with HSW leaders across Australia and New Zealand. We asked these seasoned professionals what worked during the pandemic and how this can become business as usual for HSW management in Oceania. As we explore in How can we transform health, safety and wellbeing to be future fit?, their collective experience suggests we need a very different approach to HSW.

Four foundational elements of a new HSW transformation

We believe the way forward is a holistic HSW strategy that considers the interaction of humans and systems. Our interviews with HSW leaders, together with our own research and experience, point to four key elements as the foundation for this shift:

1. Integration: HSW shouldn’t be separate or an add-on to normal operations. The function needs to find better ways to collaborate and integrate with the rest of the organisation. This means linear organisational structures should become more like networks, using digital technology to help HSW and business functions integrate with greater ease. For example, the function should be part of conversations about the new ways of working and proactively participate in embedding HSW in work design.

2. Simplicity: HSW processes have become overly complicated and heavily documented, often including unnecessary information. This is a major barrier to employee understanding and engagement. Neuroscience tells us that human beings can only absorb and make sense of a limited amount of information. We need to challenge the perceived regulatory gain of having granular information at the expense of overloading an employee’s cognitive capacity.

3. Focus: During the pandemic, when slow and laborious HSW practices were no longer viable, HSW functions were forced to prioritise the very real and present threats keeping executives awake at night. HSW leaders must continue to find effective ways to manage what is really critical without losing focus. This will require them to proactively stop trying to manage non-critical risks – and to remind others that legislation and HSW regulators often reiterate the need to focus on critical risks.

4. Agility: Despite their organisations increasingly adopting agile ways of working, HSW functions have often lagged, hiding behind the HSW compliance argument. This has resulted in a lack of progress and innovation, creating a rigidity that is actively contrary to the future of work. For HSW, the choice is straightforward: either incorporate agility into work practices or drift further away from the direction progressive businesses are going. Rigidity will only lead to the business continuing to see HSW as a hinderance rather than the driver of business success it can be.