Job Description
Lead strategic health and safety initiatives, shape and deliver safety strategy, and promote a culture of health and safety in line with company values, achieving adherence with relevant legislation and regulation. This position reports to the Executive Director, People & Sustainability, and is a member of the People & Sustainability Senior Leadership Team and the cross-company People Leadership Team. The incumbent is a regular attendee at the ESB Board Safety, Sustainability & Culture Committee. The role of Health and Safety Lead is to be ESB's strategic leader on health & safety working across the organisation to shape and deliver the health & safety strategy and related programmes, compliance, capability, and culture. Key responsibilities include leading ESB Group in the development, implementation and monitoring of ESB's health and safety strategy, formulating and implementing H&S best practice policies, procedures and supporting management systems, establishing and maintaining an ongoing schedule of review and improvement to ensure compliance with relevant standards, legislation and regulation, and continuously improving health and safety decision makers. Additionally, the role involves fostering cross-team, company-wide and partner collaboration and cooperation in the implementation of the H&S strategy and adoption of agreed policies, procedures, standards, and systems, promoting company-wide change in practices and culture, improving awareness and incorporating H&S in routine behaviours and decision-making. The role also includes leading the H&S centre of expertise, including occupational health, ensuring effective capability and resourcing of the team, creating a high impact and expert team that collaborates and advises successfully across the business, ensuring effective operation of the SHE CoE as ESB's second line of defence for SHE risk and compliance, and ensuring effective communication and delivery across the operating model. Furthermore, the role involves supporting, challenging, and enabling the H&S centres of competence underpinning the H&S strategy, building organisational capabilities for H&S systems, processes, skills and gaps, and adopting appropriate developmental initiatives for upskilling and/or addressing them. The role also requires establishing and supporting communities of practice to share and disseminate knowledge and best practice, managing stakeholders' relationships and fostering collaboration, promoting ongoing, constructive dialogue with internal and external stakeholders, working with managers and communication teams to enhance engagement on SHE across ESB, researching and briefing key stakeholders, including Executive Committee, ESB Board and committees, on key trends, best practices, policies, and legislation, leveraging data and systems to report on the Group's H&S progress using benchmarked KPIs in line with internal and external reporting requirements, developing plans for maintenance of external accreditations, and partnering with Group Sustainability and the business units in the development and ongoing monitoring of environmental & energy compliance and implementation of relevant policies and standards. The role also involves ensuring compliance with environmental regulations as they pertain to minimum health, safety and well-being of the workforce and other stakeholders, leading companywide safety efforts, leading to improved day-to-day safety hazard prevention, increased employee safety awareness, and ultimately, moving ESB to world class safety performance and culture. The role requires adopting and role modeling innovation and adaptive leadership, being comfortable with uncertainty and not having all the answers, and adopting and demonstrating a continuous improvement mindset. The successful candidate will have a strong track record in managing safety, health, and environmental programmes, a passion for H&S, and a good working knowledge and understanding of applicable policy, legislation, initiatives, and reporting standards as appropriate for the leadership level. The role involves collaboration with various teams and stakeholders, and the successful candidate will have excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to confidently engage an audience up to Board level and externally. The role also requires the ability to lead change at a business unit level, including managing a complex programme of work to deliver agreed objectives, and demonstrating leadership of a team and of collaborating with others in a matrix relationship to achieve results. The successful candidate will have a third level education in a relevant discipline, and certifications in safety, environment, sustainability, and/or social studies are highly desirable. The role is based in Dublin and will require regular travel to ESB locations, primarily in Ireland, and the successful candidate will have the opportunity to work flexibly within their jurisdiction with attendance at the workplace for in-person collaboration on at least one anchor day per week. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to lead and operate on the frontline of Ireland's transition to a net zero future, embracing and facilitating a smart working future/hybrid working, with opportunities for career development through mentoring and training, corporate social responsibility, active social and sports clubs, networking opportunities, credit union, generous pension contributions, access to staff wellbeing programmes, generous parental leave entitlements, and a great team environment working to our core values of courageous, caring, driven, and trusted. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to make a real difference in shaping the health and safety strategy and culture of ESB.