If you’re aiming for compliance, you will never truly achieve due diligence.
Say what?!? Come again?!?
If you’re aiming for compliance, you’ll never truly achieve due diligence. And the very tools you’re using to try and achieve compliance are at risk of becoming a part of the problem.
Confused? You’re not alone.
There’s a lot of talk in health and safety about the “internal responsibility system”, and what that looks like in the broader context of a health and safety management system. And while those systems are typically very good at addressing the head and the hands, or the knowledge and practical application of health and safety principles, they seldom delve into or capture that internal aspect of health and safety; that being, the heart. And even though you may not recognize it as such, that’s a problem. Because you can have the head (knowledge) and the hands (application), but that will only get you compliance with the system you’re implementing. If you don’t have the heart (buy-in), you’re never going to get to commitment, and it’s commitment that brings about due diligence.
Think of the OH&S legislation as a road map, and your OH&S systems as the satellite navigation system in your vehicle. As much as they try to capture every possible route, roadblock, traffic snarl, and weather condition, we’re all drivers and we know that simply isn’t possible. If your focus is on what the map or navigation system is telling you, and a deer jumps out in front of you, you’re going to hit it. Plain and simple. Neither the map nor the navigation system are going to have taken the exact set of circumstances in front of you into account. If you don’t rely on them, you’re going to get lost, and you’re going to have problems. But at the same time, unwavering reliance isn’t the answer either.
In the OH&S context, compliance is actually a step or two behind due diligence. When charges are laid following an incident, the Crown is responsible for proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you (or your organization) were in breach of the OH&S legislation. Or stated differently, that you weren’t in compliance. Once they do that, it’s up to you to prove that you took all reasonable steps to prevent the incident or injury from occurring - not that you did everything you could do to comply with the legislation. It’s a slight, but important difference. At that stage of the equation, the Crown has already proven that you weren’t compliant. The system that you relied on to keep you that way was clearly ineffective or broken in some capacity, in order for the incident to have happened. And you’re going to need to demonstrate that your efforts went beyond just compliance with that broken system. That you weren’t just trying to comply with or follow that system, but that you were actively engaged in the journey, and committed to the outcome that the system was designed to bring about.
So how do you go about tapping into the heart, and getting that buy-in and commitment?
It’s a question that we wrestled with for years. Because while we knew the problem, we certainly didn’t have the expertise, skill-set, or social-sciences background, necessary to connect the dots (which admittedly came as a shock, being that lawyers of course know “everything”). At the same time, and while important in their own right, the various safety leadership, team building, and emotional intelligence courses that exist have never really captured on that “head, hands, and heart” approach, and certainly never approached due diligence on the compliance vs. commitment continuum.
Which is why early last year we partnered with Dr. Johanna Pagonis of Sinogap Solutions, to develop “Moving Beyond Compliance: Creating a Culture of Commitment”: A program specifically designed to revolutionize your thinking and your approach to health and safety management systems, and health and safety more generally. To move you and your organization from focusing on compliance as some end goal or destination, to its real purpose, as just one more tool or stop along your path to achieving due diligence. It really is the first and only program of its kind specifically designed to get at the heart of an organization’s culture, and to empower your leaders with the skills and information that they’ll need to get the buy-in that’s necessary from your workers to truly bring about organizational change.
Interested in learning more? Check out our videos below, or click on this link to register / for more information. We’re starting a new virtual cohort this spring, and would love to see you there!