Cathy Hansell on Sustainability Performance through SHE at the PMA 2014 Conference

Written by Adelina Chelniciuc on June 29, 2014. Posted in News, Organisational performance

Towards the ending of the first day of the PMA 2014 Conference, Cathy Hansell, President of Breakthrough Results delivered the presentation “Accelerating Sustainability Performance by Leveraging Safety, Health & Environmental Culture”, a research study that focused on the way SHE culture, sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) help an organization achieve its goals in multiple areas.

The main goal of a Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) culture is “to achieve safe, healthy and environmentally-sound operations, workforce, business impact in the community, products and services, customers and supply chains”. Employees should be directly engaged in moving forward the SHE culture. In regards to the connection between SHE and CSR, Cathy Hansell’s findings show that both types of culture ultimately aim toward the same goals.

The steps that Cathy Hansell proposes for achieving a world class SHE performance are:

• Setting a clear SHE vision and strategy;
• Defining and measuring the SHE process and culture;
• Ensuring multi-level leadership drive;
• Establishing clear roles, targets and accountability for the leadership and associates;
• Designing preventative processes, aligned with the organizational goals;
• Focusing on innovative performance and leading indicators;
• System-based Root Cause Analysis;
• Benchmarking.

 Hansell’s main conclusion is that by leveraging SHE culture to sustainability brings increases in multiple areas, such as:

• Business productivity;
• Revenues;
• Employee morale;
• SHE compliance;
• Risk prevention;
• Transparency;
• Sustainability performance.

According to Hansell’s research study, SHE culture and sustainability become mutually reinforcing.

Tags: Performance Management, PMA 2014 Conference