NEBOSH and HSE join forces to create health and safety qualification for business leaders

Launched on the 30 April, the NEBOSH HSE Certificate in Health and Safety Leadership Excellence supports leaders who want to make a real difference to health and safety performance and culture within their organisations.

NEBOSH Chief Executive, Teresa Budworth, commented: “This new one-day qualification highlights the clear moral, legal and financial business case for improving health and safety culture. It covers the key competencies and behaviours HSE research indicates are associated with health and safety leadership excellence so that delegates can become better advocates and influencers of health and safety.”

Teresa added: "We are delighted to have worked again with HSE on this new qualification. Our ability to deliver strong, credible professional occupational safety and health qualifications combined with HSE’s industry-leading knowledge and expertise gives real value to our students and their places of work.”

When creating this new qualification NEBOSH and the HSE worked with a range of business leaders, union representatives, health and safety directors, and managers. Here are just some of their thoughts around the need for the NEBOSH HSE Certificate in Health and Safety Leadership Excellence, and the benefits it will bring:  

Ronnie Miles, Managing Director at Bells Food Group: “People at the top need to lead by example. I often hear fellow business leaders say their biggest asset is their people. If that’s the case, prove it! This new NEBOSH HSE course and qualification will only take up one day of your working year, but it can show as a leader how you recognise that protecting people from ill health and injury is one of your core business objectives.” 

Ronnie Miles is managing director of Scotland’s leading manufacturers of pies, cakes and pastry, Bells Food Group. Several years ago, Ronnie began to invest in health and safety training. For him, this was about more than just keeping people safe at the Group. “I realised that to improve financially we needed to do more to retain our staff, train them well, and that in turn this would lead to increased efficiencies. By investing more in health and safety we believed we could send a positive message to everyone.”

Ronnie took the unusual step of taking a NEBOSH Diploma himself to set a good example to staff. “There are incredibly strong moral, legal and financial drivers to improving health and safety. Now I wouldn’t expect all leaders to go quite as far as I did! This new qualification is short and focused and highlights how health and safety can support building better relationships through things like leadership walkabouts and conversations, while at the same time having a positive influence on overall performance.

“I’m also impressed, as I believe other business leaders will be pleased to see the regulator HSE working alongside such a strong vocational qualifications body as NEBOSH to develop something that will help those at the top. Levels of culpability for leaders and accompanying fines for health and safety breaches are far more significant than ever before, so it is good to see something new designed to help leaders proactively improve safety culture in their organisations.”

Nigel Clamp, Health and Safety Director, Africa & Eastern Mediterranean Basin Region at HeidelbergCement AG: “Organisations tend to do whatever the leaders of organisations highlight as their top priorities. So, for health and safety to be effective, it has to be led from the top of the organisation as a core value.”

As a Director of Health and Safety, Nigel Clamp has a strong track record working alongside business leaders and board members of high-risk operations. Nigel holds various NEBOSH qualifications including the National Diploma in Occupational Health and Safety.

“One of the most important things to understand about health and safety is that you can have a fully legally compliant business with strong processes and procedures, but that business can still kill people purely because it failed to factor in strong leadership and human behaviour,” he said.

“Good leaders understand there are now all kinds of drivers for improving safety. It can for example be about your competitors. If your safety performance doesn’t stack up against those you’re competing with, it can have a detrimental impact on business. Putting the moral aspects to one side, the stock market and your business peers understand more than ever now that safety performance can mirror your overall management performance. Good safety is good business and leaders need to know how to have a bigger influence on their managers to ensure they drive the health and safety improvement agenda down through the organisation.”

Nigel added: “This new qualification may well be an excellent new tool for health and safety directors and managers, who want something tangible they can run to the board with. Encouraging leaders to take this qualification can potentially support them in their efforts to improve health and safety culture, behaviour and performance.”

Jassim Darwish, Safety, Security, Health & Environment Manager at GPIC (Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company): “In the same way it is important for me to understand other vital aspects of my organisation, such as marketing, finance and HR, it is also crucial that other leaders have an understanding of health and safety and how they can have a positive influence and support better overall performance.” 

Jassim Darwish is Safety, Security, Health and Environment Manager at GPIC, which contributes almost USD 300m to the Kingdom’s economy every year. The organisation is strongly committed to health and safety excellence and has made NEBOSH one of its key strategic partners.

“It is mandatory here for our engineers and supervisors to go through an intensive three-and-a-half-year training programme, an essential element of which is gaining a NEBOSH Certificate,” Jassim told us. “Our strategic partnership with NEBOSH stems from our own leadership at GPIC. Our President, Dr Abdulrahman Jawahery, is a global ambassador for NEBOSH and has greatly influenced our approach here, leading to the achievement of international standards and more recently a RoSPA Gold Award.”

As a result, Jassim was delighted to be invited to contribute to the new NEBOSH HSE Certificate in Health and Safety Leadership Excellence. “I believe most organisations here in the Gulf will be motivated to send their leaders and senior managers on a course leading to this new qualification,” said Jassim. “Inspiring and leading change is a vital aspect of developing a strong safety culture in any organisation and giving our leaders greater confidence and an understanding of how they can bring about such change is a very important part of this new NEBOSH HSE Certificate in Health and Safety Leadership.”

Matthew Powell-Howard, Qualification Development Manager at NEBOSH: “It’s really important to understand this is actually more of a leadership qualification than a health and safety qualification. It is designed specifically for leaders or aspiring leaders in organisations who may or may not be health and safety practitioners. It’s about leadership and performance principles, things which many of those who will go on the course will already be comfortable with, such as transactional analysis and organisational transformation, only this time set around the context of health and safety.”

Matthew Powell-Howard is responsible for developing new qualifications at NEBOSH. He sees the new NEBOSH HSE Certificate in Health and Safety Leadership Excellence as a vital and important part of a qualifications jigsaw that meets the needs of all levels and parts of a modern organisation.

“It’s now an accepted convention that culture belongs to everyone. However, it is essential that leaders drive forward their visions for health and safety. Within that, we focus on five values, centered on HSE’s leadership model. So, it’s about having a shared vision, trust and openness and effective communications for example. All things which HSE research suggests are important in terms of health and safety leadership and developing cultural excellence.”

Matthew added: “From a practical perspective, the qualification is also about how leaders can make health and safety part of getting out there and talking to people, to support more visible leadership and have greater influence and levels of understanding.”

For more information, visit www.nebosh.org.uk/leadershipexcellence.