"Strategic alignment." Is this just another fancy term - a pipe dream - something consultants like to sell? No. It's none of the above. Strategic alignment is a powerful concept in any endeavor including health and safety (H&S). I would like to discuss strategic alignment in the H&S context. I will explain what it looks like and how to achieve it.

The Perils of Misalignment

A good way to explain the importance of strategic alignment is to consider the effect of strategic misalignment. There are many examples of strategic misalignment in business, government, etc.

As an example, let's consider the impact on an enterprise whose sales and marketing function is not strategically aligned with its manufacturing function. A case in point: About five years ago, Chrysler came out with a block buster car called the PT Cruiser. The sales and marketing outpaced manufacturing and Chrysler could not keep pace with the demand. Yes, they did put a successful car on the market and made money. However, they failed to optimize on their opportunity to achieve a real marketing and design coup.

To Achieve Alignment You Must Identify the Objectives

In order to achieve strategic alignment you need to know precisely what the strategic objectives of your enterprise are - "to seek first to understand." (Covey) Do you know the strategic objectives of your own organization? I mean, really know them?

I can tell you one thing: Identifying the strategic objectives of an enterprise is not as simple as you might think. You need to look beyond the platitudes and the value statements that hang in the visitors lobby of your building in a handsome frame.

How hard is it to unearth an enterprise's real strategic objectives? It depends on the enterprise. Some enterprises share their strategic objectives openly with employees, or at least with management; others keep their objectives close to the chest of senior management; and still others, unfortunately, are not even clear about what their strategic objectives are.

Communication with Senior Line Management

One way to identify your own enterprise's objectives is to go to senior line management, e.g., the general manager or VP of Operations, and ask two simple questions:

• What are our strategic objectives? and
• What can H&S do to help the organization achieve those objectives?

This not only starts the critical dialog about strategic objectives, but helps build a partnership between H&S and senior line management. But you also need to realize that this might not pay instant dividends. Senior line managers may not be used to being approached in this manner by a staff function such as H&S.

So go to your meeting expecting senior line managers to be unresponsive and do some homework to ensure that you are prepared to overcome any resistance you might encounter.

Linking H&S to Economic Performance

An excellent way to do this is to offer one or two examples of what H&S can do to drive the business. You can demonstrate the impact of H&S on the bottom line using outputs/metrics as business outputs.

For example, let's suppose you can show that you cut worker compensations costs over the last year by $100,000. Assume that your enterprise operates at a profit margin of five percent. You can express the savings as sales equivalent dollars (SE$). The SE$ of saving $100,000 with a profit margin of 5% is $2,000,000. In other words, the fact that workers comp costs were reduced by $100,000 actually netted the enterprise a sales equivalent of $2,000,000.

General management doesn't think this way unless we lead them to think this way by examples that they can readily identify with. The formula for SE$ is not complicated.

Another way to demonstrate financial impact is to clarify H&S's role in maintaining business continuity. For example, suppose your site had an OSHA inspection that went very smoothly and quickly. You need to help senior management understand that if OSHA conducted a penetrating and lengthy inspection it would have resulted in a significant business disruption (and possible monetary penalty).

Conclusion

Next week, in Part 2 of this series, we'll discuss the second step to take to identify your organization's objectives and what to do once you've identified them.

THE HAWK EYE'S VIEW

Tidbits from Richard Hawk

TRIVIA QUESTION:

Which industry has the lowest on job risk of injury? (answer below)

SOME OF MY FAVORITE HEADLINES:

• "Multiple Personality Rapist Sentenced to Two Life Terms," Greensboro News & Record
• "Fatalities Linked to Suicide," Indianapolis News
• "Key Witness Takes Fifth in Liquor Probe"
• "Suicide Bomber Strikes Again"

DID YOU KNOW:

• 18 percent of U.S. coins are contaminated with the E. coli bacteria
• Liquid combination cold/flu remedies can contain as much as 80-proof alcohol - equivalent to a shot of liquor
• The odds of being killed by a dog in the U.S. are 700,000 to 1
• The odds that lightning will strike Daytona, Florida some time in the next two days are 4 to 1

ANSWER TO TRIVIA QUIZ:

Legal services.

If you like these, check out Safety Stuff on Richard's website, www.richardhawkinc.com for lots more.

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