We invited Tony Kelly, Group Head of Health and Safety at IPF, to air his views on international safety operations and its associated challenges faced and ethical business practice.
With regard to safety, since the company was established what major changes have you noticed in the home credit loan market and the business culture surrounding it?
Like any business where the majority of its workforce is operating in the street and customers’ homes, the challenges faced by our people change according to societal shifts. The business has only been operating for four years as an independent entity so in terms of witnessing social change I think differences are slight.
From the start, IPF made a commitment to providing a safe workplace for all of its people and that has never changed. What we have done is spend time looking at safety management models from world-class organisations and determining how we can modify existing best practice to match our needs as well as building on our own best practices. IPF prides itself on Corporate Social Responsibilty and ethical business practices and safety is an integral part of that.
As Europe becomes more integrated, working practices change fast and often affect more than one country at a time. How to you keep abreast of what affects you and your company?
There is a head of safety in every market in which we operate and I am in the head office. We work as a global team sharing developments and practices. Each of us monitors the local law along with our company lawyers and corporate insurance companies.
That’s quite a network, so changes such as Romania’s adoption of EU standards earlier this year, become known to us all very quickly. I have tried hard to foster a team ethos of constant communication using any and every method from SMS messages to video conferencing and quarterly workshops. In fact we are exploring opportunities to use our own accident incident management database, built on technology supplied by Expolink, as a type of sharepoint for safety. Not least we are a team of global travellers (I am on first name terms with KLM cabin crew!!!) so word spreads very quickly.
What health and safety challenges do you find the most prevalent when the organisation is looking to open offices in a new country?
In every walk of life there is a tendency to fall into two traps; the first being that whatever happens in our own lives is unique to us and second is the assumption that because we don’t know about something then we presume it doesn’t exist. In terms of safety, those false assumptions could lead someone to believe that a new market won’t have safety laws equivalent to UK standards simply because in other respects the country seems less developed than our own.
In fact most, countries have very similar safety laws by virtue of being members (or aspiring to be members) of international quasi-states such as the EU or by establishing government targets to render economies sustainable as in Abu Dhabi or China. And of course providing safety to people is only humanitarian ethics in the final analysis and that is a worldwide trait; no decent person would ever wish harm on another, immaterial of where they live.
The challenge therefore is to make sure you get a copy of the local safety law in a language you can read and then do a thorough comparison to international standards such as OHSAS 18001 to establish some ground-truth.
With such a large and diverse workforce what impact, if any, do you think the UK Bribery Act will have on your organisation?
Wow that’s a question not normally asked of a safety practitioner! What I can tell you is that we already have a Code of Ethics and policies and procedures aimed at preventing bribery and corruption. With no complacency at all, we are confident that we do not have a problem with corruption in our business.
The Bribery Act will, perhaps, make people think a little harder about their conduct and will also provide us with an opportunity to revisit our current policies and procedures. We will also carry out further risk assessments and take the opportunity to ensure that our workforce’s knowledge and awareness of bribery and corruption is as good as we would want it to be.
With countries that have different HR and operational practices to the UK, what are the biggest risks to the workforce and how do you best assess and manage these?
As previously mentioned, the differences are generally pretty subtle in corporate practice. We are a global company with global standards so working conditions for our own people are pretty uniform across the group. We are rolling out global training and education schemes so wherever you are you will have had the same core skills delivered to you. The market heads of safety and their teams work to localise elements to face particular risks. Often these reflect nothing more complicated than the environment or climate.
Poland is pretty chilly in winter but in Mexico snow is something largely seen only in films, so we tailor our safety skills and communications to the target audience. We assess environmental risks at a micro-scale right down to the patch of ground covered by an individual sales agent and then these are used to form risk maps at every successive layer right through the whole group. To understand this concept, consider your own neighbourhood. Where I live is an inner city pedestrianised area with high-rise apartment blocks, lots of bars, a canal and fancy marble flooring. Where I used to live was rural with a major road of fast-moving traffic nearby. The risks associated with living and working in those two areas are clearly massively different. We then map those and build layers of what I call risk pixels into a picture for a country showing the hotspots and safer areas. We monitor and review these risk maps regularly and that’s a useful tool for educating new workers and for looking at the risks for any business expansions. I believe vehemently that risks are best assessed by those that face them and, with intelligent guidance, it is local workers who generate the best mitigation plans.
So I don’t see a single biggest risk across the group; I see single biggest risks for each neighbourhood and worker. In terms of operational practices, nobody in their right mind ever looks to get hurt and one of the things I’ve learned from thirty years of working around the world is that people are the same everywhere; they just need to be shown a better way and they will quickly adopt it. We work as a global team sharing good practice which we introduce wherever we find a gap, so homogenising operational practices is not as hard as you imagine.
How do you encourage best ethical business practice internationally?
Achieving this is like pushing on an open door. I’ve worked in all sorts of places from Afghanistan to Norway and superficially you couldn’t imagine two different places. What I have learned is that the fundamentals of ethical and social mores are the same the whole world over. We capitalise on that by showing people the positive benefits of striving for the highest ethical standards that can be achieved.
Engagement, morale, operational effectiveness and well-being all grow when a business unit is run ethically and well and that’s quickly spotted by anyone who sees a standard higher than their own. That’s our business ethic, so therefore it’s our business case for insisting our ethical standards are global, internally. Of course, as I have described, the law ain’t so very different anywhere and that provides our legal argument for insisting on compliance.
Externally, we run Corporate Social Responsibility programmes in every market in which we operate and our in-house safety mentors (like a Six-Sigma Green belt but for safety) and full time practitioners are often at the forefront of them. They can vary from helping children’s homes to education programmes at colleges and schools, all to spread the concept of ethical practice and safe working wherever we are operating.
