Near Miss Reporting's Role in ESG Success

Safety Culture and Business Prosperity

Safety and health managers dream of working in businesses with mature safety cultures. They may not know it but most investors dream of holding stakes in those same businesses. The maturity that makes health and safety everyone’s responsibility in a company and that flags up hazards before they cause any damage or lost time, is the same maturity that helps make for high productivity, healthy profits, a rising share price and reliable dividends.

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Navigating Safety Culture Stages and ESG Significance

Most businesses are in the process of getting to that level of maturity. There are various models of safety culture but what they all have in common is that they have stages of progress, whether they are represented in the form of a ladder or a curve. Organizations have to move through the stages, from not caring about safety and health, to caring only enough to respond when operations are disrupted by an accident or they land a severe fine for breaking the law, into improved management and prevention. The holy grail is that end state of maturity, described as “generative” or “interdependent” in the culture models involves predicting and preventing risk before it causes problems. Protex AI helps organizations in understanding behavioral patterns and gathering data autonomously, presenting health and safety managers with a wealth of information. This, in turn, liberates their time, allowing them to focus on actively enhancing and fostering a robust safety culture within the organization.

ESG's Role in Investment Choices

What has this to do with ESG? It may have recently become shorthand for sustainability management more generally, but ESG originated narrowly as the requirements set by institutional investors for organizations to demonstrate their credentials as responsible corporate citizens, not making profit regardless of their impact on the rest of the world. As it became more embedded in the investment world ESG gained another dimension as the fund managers who handle the money on behalf of the big pension funds, realized there was another advantage to investigating businesses’ sustainability strategies, plans and year-on-year performance. It was one way to make safer investment choices. An organization whose product was dependent on a supply of a raw material, say a mineral, that was soon to be in short supply, would not be a good medium-term bet for growth and profitability, whereas a competitor which had made plans to re-engineer its products to use other materials as part of an ESG strategy, would be more likely to generate a decent return in the coming years. In the social pillar of ESG, where health and safety management sits, a business that is working its way through the culture curve or up the ladder should be spending less on compensation and sick pay, leaving more money on the bottom line and more in the pot for shareholder dividends. 

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Harnessing Data for Prevention and Reporting Impact

To progress towards the enlightened end of safety culture models, an organization must adopt a strategic approach to safety and health. This involves genuinely engaging with employees, helping them grasp the value of safeguarding lives and limbs—both their own and their colleagues'. It goes beyond addressing safety one accident at a time; businesses need to stay ahead of near-incidents and identify hazards that require control.

A strategic health and safety approach, combined with Protex AI's capabilities, empowers you to understand near-misses and hazards across your sites. The more you understand these patterns, the better equipped you are to foster a culture of prevention, minimizing incident rates. These positive outcomes can be spotlighted in ESG reporting, signaling to investors and fund managers that you are cultivating a maturity that makes your shares a secure investment for a healthy return.