Governance Series – Meaningful Reporting

Ah, monthly health and safety reports. Everybody’s favourite job and everybody’s favourite read. Or not.

In one of my workshops, I use a real example (anonymised, obviously) of a dodgy report to get people to diagnose what is wrong with it. Which is easy because there are lots of problems to choose from.

The key thing is that, not only had the safety manager produced it month after month, executive and board members received it month after month without any pushback. I’m not sure how we got here, but we need to get on top of this.

The new IoD/WorkSafe NZ H&S Governance Guide Health and Safety: A good practice guide | IoD NZ provides good guidance on reporting, so I won’t repeat that here. Instead, let’s look at some key practical points to get to the stage of meaningful routine reports. This is from the safety manager perspective – if you’re a CEO or a director, use this to understand what you should be getting.

Throughout this, keep in mind the following two key questions for meaningful reporting:

1. Does this show that we are doing enough to manage our most significant risks effectively?
2. Does this show we have a high level of understanding of the work going on and how well placed we are to respond to something unusual happening?

Developing it

Developing your report needs to be a deliberate and considered process. Some things to think about:

Don’t do it in isolation – have a conversation with the board and executive to determine what they want/need and share what you would like to provide. This is a two-way conversation – stand your ground if they are asking for something you fundamentally disagree with (be mindful of power dynamics, though!). At this stage, this is a discussion about themes and objectives – not specific content.

Beware fixed formats – often you will be given a set format to conform to. If you can work within this, that’s fine, but don’t lose the integrity of what you’re doing to fit into it. This is a hard one if the board are insistent – after all, every department thinks theirs is a special case, why should safety be any different? This is one of the (very) few areas where it is worth using legal obligations as a lever in negotiation – particularly in New Zealand or Australia where due diligence requirements are quite specific about understanding the business. If you really can’t get past this, explore the option of an additional appendix that gives some more freedom, or work out a separate reporting protocol (e.g. fuller reports to the Board H&S Committee or regular H&S deep dives).

Once themes and approach are agreed, get into specifics. Look for narrative insights as well as data and focus on significant items – critical risks and control assurance, achievement of strategic objectives, progress against improvement plans. Provide the insight behind the information and what actions it is prompting. Always ask ‘so what?’ to any information provided:

We’ve had three audits this month:

So, what does it mean? Is that a lot? Fewer than we’d hoped?

So, what were the findings? What are we doing about them?

So, what are the associated risks? How worried do they make us?

Reports have often been based on what we can measure, rather than what we want to. If there is something that you want to cover, but don’t yet have the information you need, include it as a holding space pending development of the reporting systems. This will keep the pressure on to get those systems in place. Look for trends and direction of travel rather than snapshot information.

Include a calendar of director activities such as director and senior leader site visits, education and awareness sessions, critical risk deep dives. Use the format to track progress against these. This holds leaders to account for getting appropriately involved.

Then, when you’ve decided on the format and content, run it by the board and executive again, together with explanatory rationale for what you’ve included. Tweak afterwards if needed.

Using it

When it comes to populating the report each month and then presenting it, there are a few other things to bear in mind:

When writing the report, try to anticipate the obvious questions and answer them in the report before they’re asked. You want to leave the time available for curious and deep discussions, not clarification of things that shouldn’t need it. Don’t be afraid to invite deeper questions, or to ask for the readers’ views on gnarly problems.

Have the report presented by the most senior safety specialist in the organisation. Avoid it being misrepresented by somebody that does not have the technical background. If that person does not have the experience to operate at board level, get that on their personal development plan.

Emphasise that the report should be used as a starting point for enquiry, not a decision making tool (see here Safety in numbers (cm-safety.com)).

If you can’t answer a question, don’t bluff. Offer to come back later. Then do so (in a timely manner – don’t wait for the next meeting). You don’t want to do this too often, though, so work on being well-informed before going in.

Don’t have this as the only source of information on health and safety. Bring other people to meetings to provide a different perspective and direct feedback – the chair of the H&S Committee, a frontline supervisor, a representative from a key contracting partner etc. Then supplement it with site visits and other learning opportunities.

Refreshing it

Finally, keep it fresh.

It’s perfectly fine to change out your monitoring and measurement every once in a while. You might have gained the confidence you needed into an area of concern and so can concentrate elsewhere. Or if you have a metric that’s routinely zero, adding no value, take it out and report occurrences in the narrative of the report when they do arise.

At least annually, review the whole report – is it doing what was intended? Ask for feedback.

What you may find is that questions start to dry up as people get more confidence in what you’re doing. This isn’t healthy. If this happens, look for ways to drive engagement and discussions – include a report from a different operational business unit each month; carry out a board self-assessment and track actions arising from it or ask directors for their experience with other boards they may be on.

Above all, make sure what you are presenting is insightful and aligned with your overall direction of travel. A good report should be able to be taken as read, without the need for clarification of specifics, but which triggers interesting and curious discussions.

Next in this series, we’ll talk about focusing on critical risk. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss it.