U.K. Port Industry Launches Leadership Guidance

U.K. port employers, led by Port Skills and Safety have published a guide to leadership and worker engagement for the port industry.

The voluntary guidance recognizes that achieving an effective health and safety culture is as much about human factors, relationships, trust, communication and behaviors as it is about risk assessments, procedures and controls. 

The guidance is intended to be used by organizations and individuals to refresh their knowledge of effective health and safety leadership and engagement, as well as encouraging reflection and challenge themselves to continuously improve.

It includes a section on leadership in action, saying: “Effective safety leaders always get involved and, when necessary, take positive action. As well as creating safety committees, leaders ensure that those committees are properly supported and directed with the required authority to implement decisions, and all committee members including safety representatives attend regularly. When issues are raised they get resolved in an appropriate and timely manner and there is transparency with regard to resolution.

“World-class leaders manage risk proactively by creating and resourcing effective risk assessment and control systems and they provide workers with the necessary training and experience that is the basis for health and safety competence. Effective leaders take decisive action to manage risk and where things do go wrong they will have emergency plans which mitigate potential harm. They will take a proactive role in the investigation process seeking to learn lessons and prevent a recurrence.”

The launch of the guidance was hosted by Britain’s biggest and busiest container port, the Port of Felixstowe. Also participating in the project was the Health and Safety Executive and Unite the Union.

The guidance is available here.