2020 has been an interesting year to say the least, I think we can mostly agree we never really expected to be attending virtual certification audit, or doing internal audits in our PJs.
There are lots of video conferencing tools, but none seem to have become as ubiquitous as zoom. “To Zoom” has now become both a universal term for a conference call and a verb. Even Santa has got into the act, and there are reports of Zoom Santa’s grottos.
2020 has kick-started a revolution in how people work, organisations big and small have realised that buildings are expensive, staff can be as effective working from home as the office. Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see how we balance out with new ways of working and how many people return full time to the office.
My predictions for 2021 and onwards, are more people working from home, communities being revitalised as populations don’t commute to major work zones and shop locally for that vital coffee and daily baguette. There’ll be less business flying and business travel in general. I do wonder though whether conversations will being to be started in a new way though; “hello… can you hear me?”
Why do we manage health and safety hazards?
Why do we reduce our environmental impacts?
Why do we minimise the cost of poor quality?
Why are we doing what we are doing?
The first three are easier to answer, we manage health and safety hazards to reduce the likelihood of people being hurt, we reduce our environmental impacts to protect our planet (the only one we've got) and minimising the cost of poor quality has direct links to the other two - a badly designed process or product has potential to cause injury, increased waste is bad for the environment, wasted time is inefficient.
Why are we doing what we are doing, is much harder to answer. The reason I set up HKW Risk Management was because I really believed there was a more simple and straightforward way to do things which was better for businesses, people and the environment. I also feel an instinctive need to look after people and make things better (and to provide cake).
Yes, there are legal requirements to be met and financial penalties for not complying, but for me, the key reason for doing (or not doing) anything is the underlying morality and sustainability of that decision.
He’s checking his list, he’s checking it twice… If only compliance checking was as simple as “naughty” or “nice”!
Management systems exist to drive continual improvement in an organisation, but all too often system processes, management control documentation and audits of the system itself are approached as a check-box exercise- an overly prescriptive and binary approach that focusses on completing paperwork and not finding opportunities for improvement.
We recognise the cultural, structural and behavioural reasons why many systems fall into this trap; we recognise too the benefits that can be realised from a lean, adaptive and responsive system can bring.
For example, processes should be driven by the expertise of those who use them, be informed and improved by feedback / lessons learned, so that task owners can see the process improving delivery.
System audits should similarly look beyond whether the audit question is answered in the positive or negative, and consider why this is the case (I am a huge fan of the “5-Why’s” approach), and indeed whether the question being asked is the correct one!
A positive, proactive and creative approach to the "Check" part of the plan> do> check> act cycle is key to driving continual improvement in your organisation
Most of us think of waste in terms of materials that are no longer required, and have no other purpose. In this day and age, waste is so much more. Across the suite of ISO standards waste crops up as a consideration not just in ISO14001. Waste can be a fascinating subject and can be a great place to start for audits.
If you peer in the proverbial skip, you come across some really interesting sights. When you follow the process back, you find waste in all kinds of areas. An example of where skip diving has made a cross ISO standard difference is in builders merchants. Finding lots of broken products in the skip, customers not getting their products (now broken), and engineers repeatedly being called back to fix FLTs (who were dropping the product), and H&S getting lots of Near Miss notifications. Following a good skip dive, and the subsequent questions and investigation several factors were identified throughout the business.
When these were investigated further, this then showed that:
Although the audit finding didn’t stop there, it goes to show how important waste can be, and why a good skip dive, lots of questions and an enquiring auditor can find many ways to reduce waste.
Verification is an important sibling to audit. Whereas an audit endeavours to see evidence of conformity, verification is about substantiating a claim or a truth.
Verification can often be seen as part of the output of a process; a classic example is batch verification to ensure conformity. Verification can be a useful tool to reduce audit fatigue in businesses. Instead of waiting for audit time, good approaches can be implementing checks on process outputs to verify that you are getting conformity in the process. This might seem obvious, but extensive evidence suggests it might not be.
A real-world example is verifying bank financial records to establish that branches have completed their banking according to schedule. In this example, the business would wait until “audit” time to find masses of unbanked money in safes, rather than establishing an ongoing monitoring regime that verifies conformity.
And the winner of the most overused and annoying word of 2020 goes to...... unprecedented!
These are indeed unprecedented times, but a little piece of my soul dies every time I read that phrase - particularly early in the pandemic, when every company I had ever bought anything from sent me an email telling me how they were going to support me in these unprecedented times, which was nice of them but probably unnecessary, especially as I couldn't remember buying anything from some of them at all.
I appreciate that there are probably a limited number of suitable, headline worthy words to describe the Covid 19 pandemic but I'm not sure how much more unprecedented everything can get right now - it seems that every hour / day / week, we are faced with more unprecedentedness (I'm not even sure that is a word).
We have all had to make enormous changes to the way we live and work in the past year, and a lot of us have now resigned ourselves to the new normal (2nd place in the overused / annoying word competition category!) however I hope that some behavioural changes will stay, I miss hugging, but I don't miss driving so much (while appreciating I'm in a fortunate position to be able to WFH), I miss seeing friends and family but I like how the feeling of community and support has grown both in professional networks and personal relationships.
I won't miss everything being described as unprecedented!
Top Management is a term prevalent in Compliance circles, particularly in international standards. It refers to the Business Leaders, Senior Executives, SMTs, Directors, The Board, – each company may use different terminology but it refers to those who steer the company vision and direction, make policy, strategy and commercial decisions and take responsibility and accountability for the organisation.
It is vital for Top Management to demonstrate commitment to a company’s compliance programme. As auditors, we are looking for evidence that Top Management have established policies and objectives, drive understanding and awareness, provide the right level of resource, measure and analyse their processes, and ensure a focus on customer satisfaction all in support of the continuous improvement of their processes for quality, environmental, health and safety, information security, business continuity etc.
The term Sustainability has been common business parlance for a long time now and has become a powerful, unifying concept for how business and society can exist and grow in harmony with the complex environmental systems that we reply on. The term Sustainability has also suffered from over-use and often ambiguous or tenuous application (see earlier post on Greenwashing!).
With increasing focus being placed on public and private sector alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, all businesses no matter how large or small would benefit from understanding their sustainability performance.
By understanding and managing your environmental impacts your business can reduce waste / inefficiency, drive down energy use and improve energy resilience and meet its compliance obligations; all of which lead to better profit margins. By understanding the societal context to your organisation and engaging positively with your staff and supply chain, your business can see real gains from improved staff productivity, mutually beneficial trusted supplier relationships and enhanced customer satisfaction; all of which lead to increased productivity, profitability and repeat business.
A formal management system can help embed these sustainable practices and boost your business!
Well it had to be really didn’t it? It is in the company name after all!
To me, there is an important difference between risk management and risk assessment. Risk assessment is the daily process of identifying hazards, the associated risks and the required control measures - for example:
Risk Management which is a wider look at the context of the organisation and an appreciation of what acceptable risk looks like in that context. This can then be followed by decisions on risk treatments (which include avoiding, managing, transferring or retaining the risk) and agreement on an overall risk profile.
Avoiding delivering presents on Christmas Eve would not be an acceptable option to most of the population, so Father Christmas has clearly taken the decision to manage operating in a high risk environment, relying on glitter, joy and magic as control measures!