Whether you operate under COMAH regulations, work with hazardous materials outside that scope, or simply want to sharpen productivity, quality and reliability: strong competence management pays off. Here are three areas worth taking stock of.
- Time to update
Procedures and practices keep frontline operations, maintenance and support activities consistent, but they have a habit of going stale. Usually it‘s not neglect, it‘s capacity: businesses have been running lean for years, and the people responsible for reviewing procedures simply don‘t have the hours in the day.
That‘s understandable, but it‘s still a problem. Procedures need to be clear, current and genuinely reflective of the performance-influencing factors at play in your operation. They‘re the foundation of any competence assessment toolkit; get this step right, and everything built on top of it, from training to assessment, actually means something.
- Invest in people, not just plant
Look at how much time and money goes into maintaining physical assets versus developing people, and the gap is often stark. Companies routinely spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, on safety management systems and safety-critical equipment.
But it‘s people who control the hazards day to day: responding to alarms, reading the data, spotting a problem before it becomes an incident. This is where most businesses have room to improve. The first step is identifying who has the time, knowledge and judgement to properly assess workforce competence, then giving them the tools and time to do it well. You can parachute in a team of engineers to fix a physical asset problem. You can‘t parachute in a fix for a workforce that isn‘t demonstrating the right behaviours; that has to be built from within.
- Manage change properly
Change management is non-negotiable. Cogent Skills works with businesses to build the internal frameworks and staff capability needed to assess competence on an ongoing basis, so assessment criteria stay flexible enough to evolve as circumstances do.
This matters enormously under COMAH: good change management reduces or removes hazards, but poor change management can just as easily create them. Competence assessment has to keep pace with change in the same way operating and maintenance procedures do. Management of Change applies to your people just as much as your physical assets, systems and procedures.
What next?
Underneath all of this sits a bigger issue: many companies don‘t have a genuine, long-term plan for maintaining workforce competence. It‘s encouraging that succession planning and the ageing workforce are increasingly on the boardroom agenda, but conversations alone don‘t close the gap. Businesses need people on the ground actually doing the work, and that requires senior leaders willing to commit the vision, time and resource to make it happen.
Maintaining workforce competence needs to become part of day-to-day operations, not a periodic exercise. The good news: it doesn‘t need to cost a fortune, and it can be built iteratively over time. Once that initial investment is made, good competence management tends to become systemic, part of the culture, where assessment isn‘t seen as a challenge to professionalism but as a non-negotiable part of a genuine safety commitment.
So if you‘re in a position to influence these behaviours, ask yourself one question: how are things being done at 1am, when nobody‘s watching? Your answer tells you exactly where to focus next.
Cogent Skills has supported high hazard industries with competence management for over a decade. Visit cogentskills.com/safety-culture-solutions or get in touch by email at industry@cogentskills.com.
