HSE Specialist Role Model: Where and How to Add Proactivity?

From Conflict of Interest to a Common Goal: Balancing Plan and Safety

Historically, at many manufacturing enterprises, a situation arises where fulfilling the production plan and ensuring safety are on opposite sides of the scale. Production needs to make money and deliver volumes, while the HSE department needs to preserve people's lives and health. In her presentation, Irina Kosukhina, Leading Specialist in the Development of HSE Tools at Lebedinsky GOK (Metalloinvest), explains how to find the point of equilibrium where safe production becomes synonymous with efficient production.

Using her company as an example, the speaker demonstrates the evolution of the HSE specialist's role. Previously, the process was reactive: a specialist would go on a walkthrough, record a violation, implement a temporary corrective action, and then the cycle would repeat. Today, the focus has shifted to proactivity — identifying risks before they lead to an incident. This requires a different approach: ranking risks by criticality, conducting a deep analysis of root causes, and developing preventive measures to eliminate the recurrence of hazardous situations.

Safety Culture Committees as a Platform for Dialogue

To transition to a proactive model, simply changing instructions is not enough — a platform for open discussion of pressing issues is needed. In the company, Safety Culture Committees have become such a platform. This is a two-way communication tool that allows strategic decisions to be broadcast from the top down while simultaneously escalating complex problems from structural divisions to the top management level.

A crucial detail emphasized by the speaker: the committees are not led by HSE specialists, but by the heads of structural divisions and workshops. The HSE specialist acts as a moderator and assistant. This radically changes the attitude of line management towards safety issues, making them full owners of the process.

Work Structure and Going "Into the Field"

The committee's work is strictly structured and includes an analysis of the implementation of previous decisions, a review of the circumstances of recent incidents, an assessment of the current situation, and a discussion of barriers. However, the key element, especially at the top management level, is going out to the production sites.

Office discussions are supplemented by line walkthroughs, where managers see the problems with their own eyes and communicate with the personnel. Practice shows that it is often the workers who propose the most accurate and effective solutions to completely eliminate a specific risk. During such walkthroughs, there is also an exchange of best practices and the rewarding of employees most involved in safety issues.

Digitizing Results and Corrective Feedback

Any implemented tool requires measuring its effectiveness. Special checklists have been developed to evaluate the work of the committees themselves. The moderator (HSE specialist) evaluates the conduct of each committee against a set of criteria, which makes it possible to generate objective statistics and see the development dynamics of each division.

Based on these data, managers are provided with corrective feedback. Its goal is not to punish for low scores, but to highlight areas for growth and help the manager improve their safety management skills.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to overcome the conflict between fulfilling the production plan and safety requirements?
• How to transition from an endless search for violations to proactive risk management?
• What is the optimal structure of a Safety Culture Committee and why should it be led by a line manager rather than an HSE specialist?
• Why are line walkthroughs and direct dialogue with workers critical for finding effective solutions?
• How to digitize and evaluate the quality of safety culture events using checklists?