January 2, 2018
On the 8th day of Christmas my consultant gave to me 8 things to consider and / or do when setting objectives, after all, objectives should:
- Be SMART – i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound
- Be Consistent with your policy statement / s
- Take into account any legal requirements / compliance obligations
- Consider risks, opportunities and environmental aspects
- Be communicated across your company
- Be understood – does everybody know how their actions can contribute to achieving the objectives?
- Be monitored and updated as required – i.e. record your progress towards meeting them
- Be documented and written down in some accessible format
On the 9th day of Christmas my consultant gave to me 9 ways to provide evidence of Leadership to an auditor (this can be documented or conversational evidence):
- Sign and date the policy statement / s!
- Records of meetings where the policy was discussed and written or reviewed and updated (could be minutes, action plans or notes in a book - however you record such things is fine)
- Know, understand and be able to talk about your Why (see Part 1!), mission, vision and values
- Know what your strategic direction is and be able to talk about it, make sure everybody else knows what it is too. Is it on your website / intranet / poster on the wall / stuck next to the mirror in the loos?
- Provide adequate resources for people to do their jobs properly, this can be evidenced through an organogram, recruitment plan, training plan, machinery / equipment upgrades or investment etc
- Define roles, responsibilities and accountabilities, make sure everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing and why they are doing it, clear roles and responsibility documents can be useful here
- Publicly say thank you to people and share good feedback from customers – in person, email, company newsletters, website, intranet news items
- Demonstrate your commitment to continual improvement – be open to ideas, review the ones that are brought forward, give feedback to the originator and action the good ones wherever possible
- Promote risk based thinking through your company – is risk management considered in your existing business meetings / action plans / objectives?
- Integrate health and safety, environmental and quality requirements into normal business processes – don’t have separate paperwork / systems ‘for the auditor’!
On the 10th day of Christmas my consultant gave to me 10 items to consider when identifying environmental aspects:
- Lifecycle perspective – consider the environmental aspects of the whole process / product / service from sourcing to disposal
- Normal (and abnormal) operating conditions as well as reasonably foreseeable emergency situations
- Do your company activities emit anything to the air?
- Release anything to water?
- Release anything to contaminate / pollute land with?
- Use raw materials and / or natural resources?
- Use energy? Where does this energy come from?
- Emit anything to the local surroundings, such as noise, light, heat etc?
- Generate waste and / or by-products? What do you do with these?
- What criteria are you going to use to decide which of your aspects are ‘significant’? (i.e. which ones are you going to invest time / money / effort in managing and / or controlling)
Part 3 to follow on the 5th January…