FEFO Consulting collaborated with Ventia to deliver 90+ frontline leadership training workshops across their Australia and New Zealand operations, witnessing their commitment to this award-winning workforce initiative firsthand.
Our Directors, Terry Swanton and Amelia Simony are just some of our team that have been involved and were at the Awards in Brisbane to celebrate alongside them. Well done!
Key learning from our team of Facilitators:
Leadership Capability: Start with self-reflection and truly understand you own current strengths
Safety Culture: A high performance culture is built on trust with supervisors and effective leadership
Learning: Don’t stop learning. Seek feedback, relfect and challenge yourself to grow and improve!
To amplify and put a spotlight on the conversation around workplace health, safety and wellbeing, SAI360 and FEFO Consulting have announced a strategic partnership. The goal of this collaboration is to assist customers and communities better understand the benefits of positive well-being in the workplace and consider potential consequences of workplace health and safety risk, including psychosocial risk.
Leveraging on our combined experience and expertise, SAI360 and FEFO will work together to educate organizations on how to best promote a healthy and safe workplace culture, increase employee engagement and strive for excellence.
We will also focus on the digital solutions of today, and how they can streamline safety management by helping companies more efficiently identify risk, implement safety measures and track progress.
For more than 25 years, SAI360’s innovative technology solutions have helped create safer and healthier workplaces by digitalizing and automating Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) processes across the spectrum including operational safety, occupational health, training and injury management.
At FEFO Consulting we partner with companies to build high-performing teams by addressing workplace health and wellbeing, culture, risk and safety. Our Health and Safety Index is an insightful online assessment that enables organizations to measure, focus and act on “health” and “safety” improvements that matter.
SAI360 and FEFO are aligned in our experiences and have witnessed in the last two 2 years an increase in organizations investing more in workplace health, safety and wellbeing.
Christine Adeline, Senior Vice President of Product Management & Product Marketing states:
“Much of it was initially driven by the pandemic, however, a growing number of countries are recommending, and in some cases, requiring employers to do more in terms of workforce health and safety. This is driving demand for our solutions as well.”
Mark Wright, Managing Director, FEFO Consulting, agrees.
“We are definitely seeing an increased demand for simple ways to engage remote workforces to genuinely listen, focus on positive organizational factors, and identify potential blind spots. This also provides boards and leaders actionable, statistically reliable data to benchmark learn and improve.”
On March 15 at 9 am AWST, Christine Adeline and Mark Wright will participate in a joint webinar, “A New Way to Measure Health & Safety Performance.” Geared towards EHS&S officers, the webinar will focus on key indicators to measure health and safety performance and the important role of advanced analytics.
SAI360
SAI360 is the leading ESG cloud provider connecting GRC, EHS, Sustainability and Learning. Our SAI360 platform streamlines workflow and drives outcomes through flexible, scalable, and configurable modules. Our integrated approach sets us apart, helping organizations thrive, create trust, understand their impact, and achieve resilience for over 25 years. SAI360 is headquartered in Chicago, with operations and customers across the globe. Discover more at sai360.com
FEFO Consulting
FEFO Consulting is a purpose-driven risk, health and safety consultancy committed to helping others strive for excellence and prevent harm. For more information, visit our website.
FEFO have collaborated with like-minded safety professionals internationally to look at modern methods to measure health and safety performance.
We know that traditional methods of measuring health & safety performance often rely heavily on only Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The Human centred Safety II approach looks at what goes right and what goes wrong and in doing so can enable organisations to improve performance.
Our aim is to enable a resilient approach to measuring what matters, proposing a three-step approach.
1. Evaluate Inputs – Inputs from people, places, plant, process & data
Initially, factors influencing the safety strategy should be captured, assessed to determine what is material to the organisation. This will enable sustainable strategic choices and selection of relevant measures of success.
How can this be done? – Considering Current vs Desired state and evaluating key internal and external inputs.
2. Confirm Strategy & Metrics
Using inputs identified in step 1, informed decisions can be made that are supported by balanced Objective Key Results (OKR’s) and KPI’s. Strategic (OKR’s) assist with not losing sight of the destination or being too focused on KPI’s.
When assessing what the right metrics are that are aligned with the Organisational Maturity and Priorities, consideration can be given to the below to Make Choices and Prioritise Value. Metrics should include a combination of evidence-based and option-based KPI’s.
Further information on building out OKRs and KPIs can be found in the FEFO Blog located here
3. Measure and Monitor
Selecting metrics that matter should be balanced with organisational maturity levels and with combination of reactive, proactive, and predictive performance measures for the best results to be achieved.
Dependent on the direction and priorities of the organisation, a practical choice should be made that is suitable and achievable for the organisation.
So what does this approach achieve? Beyond measuring incident occurrences and other quantitative measures, this will assist with driving a resilient and improved safety performance.
Adopting a simple 3 step approach to measuring health and safety performance will enable success as going beyond measuring incident occurrences and other quantitative measures will assist with driving a resilient and improved safety performance.
In today’s world, change is constant, at FEFO Consulting we see many successful businesses large and small who are facing intense pressure to be more efficient, innovative, and productive – all while reducing risk and adapting to changing work conditions, client needs and regulatory environments.
Often time is the most valuable commodity. Across the business landscape, agility is becoming more important than rigid standardisation, and the basis of effective strategy is shifting from consistency to adaptability. Recognizing constant change, many organisations are adopting agile ways of working—pioneered by the tech industry—to set priorities, allocate resources, empower teams to make decisions quickly and adapt to the changing needs.
The goal is to achieve what we call fast execution. At its core, fast execution is about minimising hierarchy, bureaucracy and unleashing the creativity and judgment of the people closest to the work or project and collaborating more effectively together. The goal is to use increased autonomy in the team to create an environment where people with differing levels of capability come together to deliver outstanding performance every day—and where learning happens continuously and transparently together.
In a recent FEFO Consulting webinar the level of collaboration to track strategic performance was reported being extremely low.
~10% of participants stated they involved operations in reviewing their Health and Safety strategy at least quarterly.
Unfortunately, in today’s fast paced moving operational environments, companies enable business support functions like safety, HR, finance, IT and procurement with strategic autonomy before ensuring they have clear methods to track strategy effectiveness in a collaborative way. Autonomy without alignment and collaboration can rapidly lead to chaos.
Agile execution to work, requires an agile strategy and collaborative mindset.
OKR vs KPI
THREE FAST STRATEGY IMPERATIVES FOR LEADERS
To ensure agile teams are aligned on objectives, the Leadership Team must do three things: communicate a consistent purpose, coordinate resources, and design for speed.
Communicate a consistent purpose. The more complex and fast moving the external environment, the more important it is to align agile teams on a stable overarching purpose or mission. The best mission statements are simple and aspirational. High Performing Support Functions (e.g. Safety, HR, Finance, IT, Procurement) link and communicate how their strategies enable the company’s purpose.
Coordinate resources. The more complex your organisation and number of stakeholders the more important it is to align resources, ownership, and methods of collaboration to make effective decisions.
Is your business clear on how your operating model fits the strategy?
Do you have the right balance of ownership between operations and business support functions?
Are you bringing the right people and capability together with different perspectives and experiences to share common goals?
An effective approach is to bring strategy and budgeting processes for Support Functions, into a single operating system that encompasses goal setting, strategic planning, resource allocation, and performance management.
Design for speed. Agile, responsive organisations create an ongoing strategic loop by making deliberate, appropriate changes to communication structures and functional silos. To ensure that communication is two-way rather than just cascading down from the top, such organisations hold regular forums in which agile teams play back their understanding of what their objectives are and how they plan to achieve them. It is important to regularly showcase how objectives are met with key stakeholders, so not only can teams celebrate success, but so there can also be continued leadership support, enabling quick decisions to be made.
In an agile organisation, everyone is expected to exercise judgment, so leaders have an obligation to distill strategy and objectives to their essence—to give teams the freedom to innovate and outsource to experts to operate at speed, e.g., Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
FEFO Consulting was recently engaged by the Ebos Group as an outsourced safety resource to assist with short-term construction contractor management. This allowed Ebos to focus on core business and leverage the expertise and speed of the FEFO Consulting team.
Ebos Review
Executing with Excellence
To reap the strategic benefits of speed, organisations need to marry fast strategy to fast execution. Only when equipped with a shared understanding of the organisational landscape and the Leadership Team’s strategic intent will agile teams be in a position to effectively deliver and manage threats and opportunities —over and over again. Without clarity as to strategy, goals, resources, and methods to track performance, autonomy can quickly descend into chaos. In other words, the more alignment, the more autonomy organisations can grant.
In a tempo-driven organisation, everyone’s attention is focused on the strategic objectives and how to achieve them effectively at speed.
If you need some guidance on developing and deploying an effective strategy, contact us today.
Do your metrics allow you to learn, adjust and improve?
If either your strategy is wrong or metrics are in effective, there is a good chance there are lost opportunities for success.
The Objective and Key Results (OKR) approach to setting goals is a great way to effectively support a strategy and has been used at Google, LinkedIn Airbnb, and many more. OKR’s are often complimented by Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
Overreliance on indicators, rather than the destination
OKR vs KPI
So, what is the difference between OKR’s and KPI’s?
OKR’s set out the direction of what needs to be achieved, e.g., the desired destination.
KPI’s provide indicators of how progress is tracking, e.g., the speedo.
Objective & Key Results (OKR)
What do we want?
Where are we going?
Where do we want to play?
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
Did we meet our objective?
What needs to change?
Do we need to do more?
One of the key differences between OKRs and KPIs is the intention behind the goal setting. KPI goals are typically obtainable and represent the output of a process or project already in place, while OKR goals are somewhat more aggressive and ambitious.
However, while OKR goals should be bold, they shouldn’t be unreachable. The idea behind this strategy is that by crafting aggressive OKRs, you can push your team (and yourself) to perform that much better.
Where to focus your effort, OKR’s or KPI’s?
OKR’s in Action
The Objective is qualitative, and is supported by about 3-5 Key Results, which are quantitative. They are used to focus a group or individual around a bold goal. Key Result metrics tell you if the objective are met in a given period of time typically rated from 0.0 – 1.0.
Most Key Results are evaluated each quarter to inform the next quarter’s work. It’s important the outcomes of evaluating Key Results promote high performance with a focus on the desired behaviour. Often incentivising teams with praise and recognition is great way to encourage and motivate, rather than focusing on negatives.
What makes a Good OKR?
Bold: Effective OKRs represent meaningful change, improvement, and growth. OKR’s outline priorities for the next 30-90 days.
Objective: Effective Objectives are meaningful, audacious and inspiring.
Effective Key Results: Specific and timebound, aggressive and realistic, measurable and verifiable.
Aligned: Organisational OKR’s should cascade to teams and individuals.
What is a KPI?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to evaluate performance over time for an organization, individual, program, project, action, etc. While you may have some outliers, these indicators are often measured against targets.
We highly recommend you make your KPIs measurable. Adding quantitative value makes it easier to provide context and compare performance for whatever you’re measuring. Creating qualitative KPIs is possible, but not advisable because this structure can lead to confusion and subjective interpretations of data.
What makes a good KPI?
Good KPI combine a balanced approach to include both Evidence-Based and Opinion-Based metrics:
Predictive: Accurately forecasts the future.
Valid: Measures what you intended, statistically meaningful.
Important: Directly reflects an outcome that matters.
Functional: Used to inform operational and strategic risk. Balances compliance vs performance.
Clear: Understood and easily communicated.
What makes a good health & safety KPI?
When selecting the right KPI, it’s important get the balance right. Examples of KPI’s are outlined below:
A balanced approach to KPI’s
Tailoring metrics to suit your organisations maturity
Executing the Strategy
Developing measures for success with OKR’s and KPI’s is an important step, but only one component to develop and deploy an effective strategy. To get started, refer to some additional resources below:
