The shipping industry faces a period of profound change as it works towards meeting its ambitious Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) goals. As part of this transformation, SHS are working to foster a culture of care across the maritime sector with the development of a toolkit of measurable best practice key performance indicators (KPIs). With an emphasis on low impact, cost-effective and viable measures, it is hoped that these tools will assist participating organisations to track their own regulatory compliance, assess the impact of their own policies on seafarer health and welfare, and help them benchmark their successes and areas of improvement.
The Best Practice KPIs are divided into four incremental stages, participating organisations will ascend through levels as they progressively improve and embed health and well-being measures into their corporate DNA, before reaching a level of best practice in which companies go above and beyond to implement policies that prioritise health and wellbeing.
- Expected Base Level – organisations have implemented the essential requirements of the MLC
- Performance Accountability Level – organisations have advanced beyond the expected base level and have created a framework for monitoring performance against base-level requirements, using this to set priorities for action.
- Enhanced Level – Advancing beyond the performance accountability level, organisations now include all aspects of MLC that have a bearing on health and provide a framework for monitoring performance and setting priorities.
- Best Practice Level – Advancing to the final level, organisations at this stage provide scope for recording innovative health and wellbeing initiatives and evaluate their effectiveness with data and comprehensive feedback processes.
The KPIs have been carefully crafted to complement other commercial and regulatory regimes, avoiding conflicting requirements and ease adoption, trackability and ease of measurement are at the core of this framework, and we encourage organisations adopting the KPIs to adopt a data driven approach, in which each factor is measured according to a five-stage scale.
Seafarer Health and Wellbeing
SHS has been at the forefront of seafarer health initiatives for over 200 years. Following a detailed scientific review and wide-ranging discussions it has identified the key means for improving the health and wellbeing of today’s seafarers as a change in the culture of the industry to one that fosters a culture of care for their health and wellbeing. This has its roots in similar developments in safety and environmental management, where stepwise changes in corporate culture need to complement regulatory and insurance-based incentives to take effective action to improve performance. It has been shown that these need to permeate all levels of an organisation from board level to the individual employee and that they bring benefits to the organisation and to everyone in it.
Such cultural changes are particularly important at the present time when skilled seafarers are becoming a scarce resource and the ability to attract, develop and retain a stable, well-motivated and valued crew can be seen as both a ‘ticket to trade’ and as, future vessels become increasingly complex, economically beneficial by securing efficiency. Even more important are the benefits to crewmembers themselves, with more secure and fulfilling jobs and a greater chance of a long, healthy, and happy life.
Purpose
The SHS best practice review aims to gather data on a culture of care in order to provide a formal framework and criteria to complement other commercial and regulatory requirements. SHS aims to provide a stepwise approach for organisations to self-assess and implement their own quality improvement.
Who is conducting this research?
The data are being collected and analysed by Sandra Welch and the SHS research team as part of the SHS best practice review. For more information contact [email protected]
Surveys
To complete the confidential survey please click into the links below for the required level.
Level 2 – Performance Accountability Level
More information of the Yale Report and Consultation Paper can be found here.