As a health and safety tutor I have to introduce myself to rooms full of students all the time. I always start by telling them that I used to work as a production supervisor in an industrial bakery near Sheffield making tea cakes, white baps and hot cross buns for Marks and Spencer’s. And then I confess that as a production supervisor I had no particular interest in health and safety. I knew that it was one of my responsibilities, because it said so in my job description, and I did do some health and safety related activities routinely; such as safety inspections. But I was not particularly interested in…
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Accountability and Commitment Within Environmental Leadership
Key Elements of Effective Environmental Leadership In this post I thought we could have a look at what makes an effective environmental leader. Whether you are a leader or you aspire to be one or want to assess your current environmental leader hopefully this post will be useful to you! Strong environmental leadership involves the development of the organisations mission, values and vision. It involves two key themes, these are accountability and commitment. As an environmental leader you are the person who is accountable, such that the buck stops with you. Accountability therefore means that you are ultimately responsible for environmental management within the scope of your area of management,…
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ISO 45001 Update
ISO 45001 is a safety management system standard that is meant to be a global replacement for similar standards such as the BS OHSAS 18001 and ILO-OSH 2001. It clearly takes some cues from the ISO 31000, guidelines on risk management. You may wonder why it’s needed given the popularity of OHSAS 18001. In the fast and furious world that is ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation), protocol is followed. An initial draft is produced and published, which is supposed to stimulate public debate. It’s called a DIS (Draft International Standard). And DIS ISO 45001 has been out for a while (since January 2016) and has stimulated debate. Whilst it was…
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NEBOSH Diploma Syllabus Revision News #7
In our voyage of unbridled discovery, we continue to element A8. As with the previous incarnation of the syllabus, this element is basically an extension of the previous element. The topic of leadership is revisited in the context of human motivation theories. Human motivation theories are like the leadership theories – everyone has their own pet theory and there’s a germ of truth in most of them. But they never really tell the whole story because of the complexity that is mankind’s psyche. Vroom’s ideas are brought up again. It’s a so-called “expectancy theory” of motivation from the 1960s. It’s called “expectancy” because people are motivated to behave in a…
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NEBOSH Diploma Syllabus Revision News #6
As our writers continue to busy away at writing, I’ll continue my trawl through Unit A of the national diploma. Delightfully, we are on to element A7. This is everyone’s favourite. The world of “organisational factors” (aka organisational culture, but could also be called “death by misadventure”). It’s an area that we all know is important – the way we relate to people around us at work and interact with the systems and processes is of equal importance to our technical ability in the job. This is especially important in safety leadership. Leadership is subtly different from management and has more of an emphasis on inspiring and motivating people, rather…
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NEBOSH Diploma Syllabus Revision News #1
NEBOSH started their second phase consultation on Friday 14th August. They issued course providers with revised syllabi for further consideration. The proposed revisions take account of comments from employers, students, course providers and examiners. The revised documents now contain concrete proposals for syllabus changes. These changes may or may not make it into the final versions but it does at least give some insights into current thinking. We’ll go into the details of the proposed changes, and what they might mean, in later news bulletins but for now, we’ll just give you a an overview of the changes. One of the purposes of the revisions was to get much better…
