Guidance
The benefits that you might realise from reporting your OSH performance are that you can:
- demonstrate transparency and accountability;
- provide important information for stakeholders, including investors and potential investors;
- enhance sustainability and CSR reporting;
- facilitate best practice benchmarking;
- monitor and demonstrate progress;
- highlight OSH successes, improvements and commitment;
- signpost other internal and external information;
- gain competitive advantage through showing excellence to potential partners and stakeholders, and by showing the integration of OSH, economic, environmental and social factors; and
- highlight achievements (awards etc), contributing to good PR and employee morale.
- managers, particularly senior managers wishing to check data;
- employees and applicants for jobs;
- trade unions;
- customers, clients, suppliers and contractors, particularly during the tender process. The information would also help conscientious contractors;
- local residents, particularly around nuclear power stations and major hazard sites;
- the public, particularly following incidents such as the Buncefield explosion;
- consultants, when looking for business opportunities;
- insurers, when setting premia and offering services;
- shareholders and other investors, particularly with the rise of interest in CSR;
- competitors, for benchmarking;
- media and researchers;
- enforcement agencies, when looking for current practice to determine interventions and the need for guidance and legislation;
- government departments – as a procurer of services; and
- non-statutory health and safety organisations.
RoSPA believes that you should concentrate on internet, rather than hardcopy, reporting, because it is:
- better able to help realise many of the above benefits of reporting;
- relatively cheap to produce, compared with print runs and mailing costs;
- in a form that allows paper copies to be generated;
- accessible and free to anyone with access to a computer;
- instant;
- easily updatable;
- potentially “democratic” in that it allows more than one person to contribute to the content;
- able to provide far more information than would be contained in a printed text;
- able to allow a more flexible and amendable approach;
- able to allow sharing and easy dissemination of information;
- immediately accessible worldwide; and
- is a medium of today and the future.
In addition, there is some evidence that internet reporting encourages a higher standard of reporting than paper annual reports, RoSPA’s own research found that “the number and quality rating of those [organisation] that report on performance and target issues appear in general to be better in web-based information than those found in printed annual reports.”
Perversely, many of these advantages can also be perceived as disadvantages or present potential problems, that you need to check against.
These include the possibilities that the information can be:
- added at any time without warning, often without the knowledge of key people, unless there are proper custody chains;
- continually supplemented, with information left on the site and becoming out of date; and
- hard to locate because of the volume of the information.
That said, the choice of medium should reflect how the information will be used, and RoSPA is not advocating exclusive use of the web, only that it is the correct medium for GoPOP. Business in the Community, for example, advises that: “To ensure accessibility to the broadest audience, web-based reporting should be seem as complementary to hard-copy reporting rather than as an alternative.”
There are two basic ways of presenting your OSH information on the internet:
- bespoke – an OSH report, bringing together information from the various headings as well as any other information your organisation wishes to report on. The report can be on OSH, or part of your organisation’s annual report or a report combining issues such as OSH, corporate social responsibility, environment and sustainability; or
- passive – relying on search engines, signposting and links to locate information that is dispersed throughout the site. In this model, a special report is not produced, although the quality of information might still be very good.
Bespoke reporting will usually be more resource-intensive, but the rewards are likely to be better for the compiler and the information seeker.
Good practice for finding electronic information is that it should never be more than “three clicks” away. Although this can be true of OSH information, knowing which three to click is often problematic, so;
- ideally, you should be able to link to the OSH report direct from your home page;
- if a link is not possible, you should include the information within an intuitive grouping, usually either “Corporate Social Responsibility” and “Environment”’ / SHE”; or
- if options 1 or 2 are not possible, other intuitive headings include ‘”about us” (or equivalent), “sustainability”, “policies”, “workforce” and “reports”.
