The primary objective for any company in occupational health and safety is to build and maintain a concrete and adequate level of risk prevention and protection, for the benefit of every worker and collaborator.
Effective worker protection is only marginally a regulatory obligation and moral duty; workplace safety prevention should instead be valued as a global strategic factor since, when properly managed, it can significantly improve the entire organisation, shape the development and quality of personal and professional behaviours, support corporate ethics, and at the same time deliver tangible benefits for the business.
It is therefore important to move beyond the mindset of treating safety as “accessory or contingent”, and instead adopt a comprehensive, integrated vision of risk prevention aligned with the core business — whatever that may be. These are two inseparable and complementary components of business management that must be considered and valued together, governing the potential tensions and balances that arise between them.
When a company embraces this logic in its business activity, the conditions are created for a system that offers only advantages, with no real drawbacks, no undesirable side effects — only benefits. Costs, efforts and resources are consolidated and channelled towards an integrated objective, without any being excluded or penalised. This also ensures the best legal protection in occupational health and safety for every level of the hierarchy (employer, managers, supervisors and the Prevention and Protection Service) that demonstrates a consistent, credible and, above all, effective approach.
Occupational health and safety legislation, and the European directives from which it derives, has never concealed this objective and has always promoted it as a primary pillar of the system: coherence between production and prevention systems and organisations. Coherence means understanding and accepting that every action, rather than being independent or detached from others, is a link in a chain, with positive or negative consequences and repercussions. There are no watertight compartments, no autonomous units: within a business, interdependence characterises every action, every decision, every omission, every effort and every expenditure, channelling everything into an integrated vision that becomes an advantage (win-win), not a constraint.
Knowing how to “read” and govern this vision in relation to the potential implications and achievable benefits — consistently and across every area — in relation to every small or large daily challenge that every organisation faces, means managing the company with a truly systemic logic, with genuine coherence relative to its own nature and the level of worker health and safety protection achieved, and on the basis of which to effectively plan actions for constant, informed and shared improvement.
This vision must become a concrete process for addressing every situation within the company, finding solutions that do not rigidify the organisation or become inapplicable or unapplied, but are instead recognised as useful or at least necessary, and whose implementation is at the same time: flexible in execution, repeatable over time, adaptable to the company’s characteristics and to the different needs of the functions and individuals to whom they are directed, and capable of keeping pace with the natural evolution of business processes and organisation.
This also means moving beyond an “emergency-driven” mindset or the view of prevention and protection actions as accessory or contingent: ultimately, whether it involves setting up the management of a contract or assessing the risk of explosive atmospheres, the maintenance procedures for electrical installations or biological risk, the value and effectiveness of decisions and measures is measured not only by their timeliness, but by the ability to embed them in the company’s institutional knowledge, also facilitating the management of any subsequent updates.
Drawing on its experience, and mindful of the above, CEPER has developed its own method for occupational health and safety consultancy and training, through which it promotes and facilitates interaction with the personnel involved, on a cross-functional and multi-competence basis, and the adoption of tools and documentation that support the management of these vertical and horizontal interconnections.
The CEPER method is high-impact, cross-cutting and comprehensively engaging, enabling CEPER to support companies in managing both routine and exceptional occupational health and safety obligations, offering a pathway of solutions, tools, documents and templates, to be customised according to each company’s specific circumstances.
The proposed approach is structured around a number of actions that are repeated and adapted to the different business areas where their application is required, using specifically designed tools.
The first action involves a preliminary compliance check of the area or topic under examination, against regulatory and/or technical requirements; the analysis must use clear and shared tools (such as specific checklists) kept up to date with developments in legislation, the state of the art and the situations under review.
The second action requires assessing the residual risk in work activities and the implications for managing complex or multidisciplinary issues (contracting, procurement, health surveillance, training, etc.), taking into account the actions, measures and procedures in place.
This assessment process aims to verify the appropriateness of measures implemented and to define improvement actions, supported by clear definition, formalisation and implementation of management and control activities across the various areas, through procedures and related forms. In most cases, online and/or offline digital tools facilitate and automate implementation and accessibility across multiple levels and related areas (avoiding oversights or knock-on effects, i.e. unforeseen issues).
The third action consists in disseminating information consistent with what has been analysed and defined in the process described above, so that — including through information, training and instruction programmes aimed at every corporate function — the implemented measures become an integral part of every function’s activities.
The result is an integrated system that is easy to use, auditable, updatable over time and therefore more protective in the event of intervention by supervisory bodies and the judiciary, as it is effectively implemented.
An example, to clarify the concepts set out above.
Fundamental requirements in contract management include verifying the professional suitability of selected companies and preparing a Single Document for Assessment of Interference Risks (DUVRI) specific to each contract. These are resource-intensive requirements (in terms of energy and time) and are sometimes neglected or postponed due to a genuine lack of time and/or adequately prepared resources. This documentation is of course designed to have a preventive effect — that is, to make the practical execution of the contract safer — but its perceived value is often only “reactive”, triggered by the occurrence of an incident involving a contractor, when the company faces the possibility (probability) of being implicated in liability proceedings.
Contract management cannot be reduced to hoping that everything goes well, or to effective governance of only the most significant or critical contracts, or to late — or even retrospective — management. On the contrary, what is required is a method that ensures compliance with the obligation, makes its value tangible to all stakeholders, involves every corporate function, and provides the right degree of flexibility in the use of internal resources or, where necessary, an external service at sustainable costs.
To this end, CEPER also offers an online tool, aiming to provide a system customised to the client’s contracting types and related specific risks, and — if required — a remote verification and monitoring service for professional suitability, as well as document preparation and updating. Through a practical and comprehensive tool, the systematic management of contracts and the timely fulfilment of required obligations becomes an advantage for all parties (including the contractor) and an essential improvement for the client company.