How much health and safety knowledge does a director need?

When I think about personal due diligence for a director, I think about the habits you build around educating yourself and continuing to learn.

Health and safety is a broad field. It encompasses psychology and organisational studies, engineering, physics and chemistry, anthropology and culture. On the health side, there is biomedical science and evolving knowledge about disease, cancers and other health effects.

There is a lot to understand and it is always changing. That doesn’t mean you need to become a health and safety specialist.  

Start with your organisation’s risks

Understand the health and safety risk profile of your organisation.

Think about physical and psychological health effects as well as the safety risks created by the work your organisation does.

Use that risk profile to guide your learning. Develop your knowledge in the areas that matter to the organisation you govern. 
There are plenty of resources available to help. The Institute of Directors has health and safety resources for directors, such as Health and Safety Governance: A Good Practice Guide. Organisations including the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management and the Health and Safety Executive in the UK also provide material that can help build your understanding.

I’d also encourage directors to look beyond the mainstream sources.

Find out what people are debating

Health and safety podcasts are one way to hear different thinking and follow debates within the profession.

Two I recommend are The Safety of Work, hosted by Dr Drew Rae and Dr David Provan, and Safe As, hosted by Ben Hutchinson.

Both take quite an academic approach to health and safety. They are useful if you want to move beyond foundational knowledge and understand some of the current debates, challenges and points of disagreement.

Not every health and safety question has a settled answer.

Understanding what practitioners and researchers are discussing – and where they disagree – can help you look more critically at the information coming to the board.

Learn enough to ask better questions

Build your knowledge so you can ask good, insightful and critical questions around the board table.

When health and safety data comes to the board, alongside the stories about what is happening in the organisation, you need enough understanding to test it.

Ground your questions in your organisation’s risks and in what is changing and being debated more widely.

Personal due diligence isn’t something you complete. Build the habit of continuing to learn, then use that knowledge to improve the questions you ask.

Dan Davis is Head of Research, Development and Training (NZ) at HSE Global. He works with boards, executive teams and frontline leaders across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, combining workplace consulting, facilitation and training. His work focuses on helping organisations move beyond a traditional view of health and safety as a cost of doing business towards seeing it as a driver of better performance, culture and engagement.