When the org chart changes overnight, what happens to the health and safety system underpinning it all?
Photo: Enhesa
Responding is Mary Foley, expert services strategy director, Enhesa, Brussels, Belgium.
Mergers, divestments and reorganizations make headlines for the deal value. They rarely make headlines for what happens to the safety system underneath. Yet, in 30 years of working across deal-intensive sectors, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: a transaction closes, the org chart is redrawn, and the health and safety program that quietly managed thousands of workers the day before is now operating across two – possibly more – legacy systems, alongside several reporting lines and a safety leadership team that might not have met.
The real question isn’t whether safety survives a restructuring; it’s where the cracks appear first – and whether anyone is looking.
Responding is Mary Foley, expert services strategy director, Enhesa, Brussels, Belgium.
Mergers, divestments and reorganizations make headlines for the deal value. They rarely make headlines for what happens to the safety system underneath. Yet, in 30 years of working across deal-intensive sectors, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: a transaction closes, the org chart is redrawn, and the health and safety program that quietly managed thousands of workers the day before is now operating across two – possibly more – legacy systems, alongside several reporting lines and a safety leadership team that might not have met.
The real question isn’t whether safety survives a restructuring; it’s where the cracks appear first – and whether anyone is looking.
If I had to define “good” in one sentence for a safety and health leader walking into a post-deal integration, it would be this: Every site, regardless of which legacy company it came from, can answer the same three questions in the same way by the same date:
- What are our top risks?
- Who owns them?
- And how do we know our controls are working?
The organizations that manage restructuring well are the ones that stay grounded in three fundamentals:
- Understanding the organization’s strategic objectives
- Maintaining visibility over regulatory obligations across every site and business
- Keeping focus on material risks throughout the integration process and afterward
Because when reporting lines change overnight, unmanaged risk doesn’t wait for the integration roadmap to catch up.
In the end, the organizations that navigate change safely are the ones whose leaders treat safety integration as an operational priority from Day 1.
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Original article published by Safety+Health an NSC publication