Welcome back to our three-part series! Today, we’re diving into Stage 2: Consultancy & Coaching—helping you bridge the gap between policy and real-world application.
A strong SMS strategy isn’t just about having policies—it’s about making them work. That’s where Consultancy & Coaching come in:
→ Consultation shapes your safety culture, ensuring policies become actionable, measurable strategies instead of ‘shelfware.’
→ Coaching empowers your team to lead safety initiatives—from proactive hazard identification to fostering a just culture.
With expert guidance from SQEP, your SMS becomes a proactive, trusted system that strengthens compliance and operational efficiency.
🔍 Coming up next: Stage 3: In-House SMS Training – empowering your team to sustain and drive SMS success.
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Stage 2: Consultation & Coaching
Firstly, what’s the difference between consultation and coaching? Well, consulting focuses on providing expert advice and implementing solutions to specific problems, while coaching focuses on guiding individuals or groups to achieve their goals through self-discovery and development.
Consulting would typically help an organisation to fully understand why the culture is what it is and provide strategies for helping the culture get to where it needs to be. Written artefacts drafted by a SMS specialist help the organisation to ‘say what they do’ (or more likely, will do) in order that they can then ‘do what they say’. This then provides opportunity to measure and monitor using the artefact as the standard. The SMS Policy is a vitally important document that is carefully crafted and then signed by the Accountable Manager (and often, the Senior Leadership Team), but a good consultant will then provide meaningful measurables to ensure the promises made and expectations hoped for in the Policy come to fruition. All too often SQEP witnesses a perfectly good Policy Statement that is then ‘shelfware’ and the organisation has no idea if it is meeting its own policy.
An example of coaching would be preparing a Safety Manager to conduct a proactive hazard identification working group. Perhaps the SMS specialist would provide instruction and then conduct the first one with the SMS Manager either observing or acting as scribe to capture the inputs from the group. Once observed, the Safety Manager should then conduct the next one with the SMS specialist observing and providing wisdom on areas for improvement. This way, you can maximise the inputs from the workforce and gain knowledge of hazards that may never be known by the management team. You can’t fix what you don’t know about.
So why would an organisation benefit from employing an SMS specialist from SQEP? Quite simply, having scars from doing it wrong in the past, combined with so many success stories, it would make your SMS journey logical, successful and even a pleasure, especially as third age reports (I nearly did something wrong) start to roll in. More importantly, it’s so easy to do things wrong, do them in the wrong order, say or do something that is not aligned to your blossoming Just Culture. This could cost years to repair (if indeed it’s possible to repair). Once you have trained your staff to ‘trust’ that the management will respond in the right way when they make an error or mistake, or even raise a report, it can really damage the trust between the workforce and managers/leaders when ‘the old ways’ of doing business result in personnel receiving admonishment even before an investigation is completed. Coaching managers to agree on a code of conduct and to take that extra 10 seconds to consider the desired safety culture before acting can work wonders.
If you are struggling to come up with KPIs, leading and lagging indicators, a reporting form and system that makes it easy to report and analyse trends, need training courses that are psychologically geared to build understanding and trust whilst calling to action your entire workforce, please give SQEP a call. We can help.
Need expert guidance on SMS compliance? Get in touch with Si Hays today.
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