What is a Health & Safety strategy?
A Health & Safety strategy is a series of outcomes, actions and measures (KPIs) that an organization can implement to improve its performance in terms of the health and safety of employees, customers and other stakeholders. Read Cascade’s guide on How To Write A Strategic Plan to gain further insight applicable to the provided template.
What's included in this Health & Safety strategy template?
This template has been designed to incorporate the 3 main elements of a good Health & Safety strategy - outcomes (also known as objectives), actions (in this case projects) and measures (otherwise known as KPIs). Each objective in the strategy has a mix of projects and KPIs underneath it that give you a complete off-the-shelf toolkit for implementing a new Health & Safety strategy for your organization.
- Health & Safety Vision Statement
- 3x Health & Safety Values
- 4x Health & Safety Focus Areas
- 12x Health & Safety Objectives
- 26x Health & Safety Projects
- 13x Health & Safety KPIs
Who is this Health & Safety strategy template for?
The template is industry agnostic and flexible enough to be suitable for small business right through to large corporations. It includes a range of industry best-practices around the creation of a Health & Safety strategy taken from examples in a range of different industries. This template will provide you with insight into how to better Plan, Manage & Track your Strategic Plan.
How do I use this Health & Safety strategy template?
Simply modify the contents of the template to suit your needs. The template is fully customizable and you can use it off-the-shelf or as a starting point for creating your own Health & Safety strategy. Here are a few of the things that you might want to do once you get access to the template:
- Add extra objectives
- Modify the focus areas
- Add realistic targets to the KPIs for your own organization
- Change the dates of key projects to match your needs
- Assign owners throughout your organization
- Add and assign tasks to projects
What is an Example Health & Safety Strategy?
Cascade Strategy believes in a goal alignment approach to strategy, this illustrates the value that a single KPI has in relation to the overall vision. This is especially important in regard to health and safety strategy as effective planning, managing, and tracking ensures the Health & Safety of all employees. The following strategic planning example will be a simple Health & Safety Strategic Plan of a hypothetical construction company. This example was written following our How to Write a Strategic Plan Guide!
Vision Statement
At the top of the Cascade Strategy Model is the Vision Statement, this is the anchor point of any strategic plan. It outlines what an organization would like to ultimately achieve and gives purpose to the existence of the organization. A good vision statement should be short, simple, specific to your business, leave nothing open to interpretation. It should also have some ambition.
Example Vision Statement: To create an environment in which all individuals involved on-site are safe and feel encouraged to raise concern with any potentially hazardous conditions or situations.
Values
Underneath a company’s vision statement lies their values, the process of Creating Company Values should be developed through identifying the areas most important to the company and knowing the people in your company, not by copying others. These values should be powerful and relevant unlocking the potential and passion of your people, helping bring your vision statement and strategic plan to life.
Example Company Values: Respect, Collaboration & Excellence
Focus Areas
Focus areas are the foundation stones of your strategy. They expand on your Vision Statement and start to create some structure around how to actually get your organization to achieve its goals. When Creating Strategic Focus Areas there are a few rules that Cascade suggest you follow.
- Make them concise (less than 6 words)
- Don't make the scope to broad
- No jargon
- No metrics
Example Focus Area: Proactive Risk Management
Objectives
Writing Strategic Objectives is probably the most fun and exciting part of creating your strategic plan. A Strategic Objective is a high level statement that outlines what exactly you want to achieve, with a clearly stated deadline. It differs from a Focus Area - in that it is specific in what you want to achieve, has a deadline attached and once completed will be replaced by another, different objective. In other words, it is something that can be tangibly achieved. Your strategic objectives should be attached and contribute to achieving at least one of your Strategic Focus Areas.
Example Strategic Objective: Reduce number of on-site accidents
Projects
Creating Effective Projects will describe what you will do to accomplish your objectives. It is at this point in your strategic planning process that you will start to scope out exactly what actions you will take in order to achieve certain objectives. Projects should align to one (or more) of your strategic objectives and sit underneath them. The difference between objectives, projects and KPIs are that Strategic objectives state what you want to accomplish while projects state how you will achieve those objectives, with KPIs used to measure your success at achieving those objectives.
Example Projects: Provide additional safety training course, Develop an anonymous report system
KPIs
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator...but what does key performance indicator mean? Well, the KPI definition that we use is, a measurable value that shows the organization's progress towards achieving key business objectives. Organizations can use Key Performance Indicators as a way to track whether their key business objectives are on track, behind, ahead, or have been achieved. How to Write KPIs? This is question often asked during the strategic planning process, Cascade noticed a lot of people struggling to find examples on the web that were the right fit for their needs. That’s why Cascade has written 84 Key Performance Indicators for 2021.
Specific Health & Safety KPI Examples: Number of reported accidents, % of on-site individuals trained