Process
Health, Environment Safety and Social Management in Entreprises (HESSME) seeks to bring together the best practices in health, environmental and safety performance at work and introduce them into new business methods, based on continual improvement, for the benefit of all to provide Workplace Well-being.

Health, Environment & Safety Management in Entreprises has been developed with help from many stakeholders from universities, government representatives, environment health practitioners, and health promotion professionals. They all worked in the project with support of the WHO European Region to develop that model that can be used by SMEs.

HESSME approach takes into account initiatives of the UN, OECD, EU Network for Workplace Health Promotion, UK Environmental Reporting, and ILO H&S Management Standard, that promote social and environmental improvements through business. These aim to provide for the ever changing and increasing demands for healthier work and better environment.

HESSME Guidelines stress that compliance to national laws and regulations are the responsibility of the employer and encourage the integration of HESSME with overall policy and management arrangements. At organisational level, HESSME should be a line management responsibility, and should not be seen as a task for certain departments and/or specialists.

HESSME:

• Integrates Health Promotion, OHS, Environmental Management
  
• Brings Health, Environment & Safety into a mainstream quality-based system
  
• Fits International Health, Environment and Safety standards

HESSME has seven steps which follow the internationally accepted Demming cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act, which is the basis to the "system" approach to management. These steps are

Plan: How to start, Review state of health and environment
Do: Carry out Risk Assessment, Set targets for improvement
Check: Achieve your targets, Report the outcome
Act: continual improvement

Organisations start by ensuring commitment from the top, and then review the present state of affairs. They then carry out health and environmental risk assessment in order to set targets that relate to their own workplace. The achievement of these HES targets is checked and the result reported to all concerned parties. Then processes and procedures are enacted that will ensure continual improvement.

The step-by-step approach helps managers incorporate health and environmental concerns into the day to day running of a small company. At each step, managers incorporate health, environment and safety concerns. Throughout there should be dialogue - not just consultation. Sit with your co-workers or workers to decide what you are going to do to maintain well-being at work. You can do a lot yourself and should be able to steer professionals to help you.