It can sometimes be difficult to know when your company has reached the point of needing a health and safety manager but there are some key questions you can ask to find your answer:
- Have your accident frequency and severity rates been increasing steadily?
- Are you in a high risk industry with many hazards present in day-to-day operations?
- Have you been audited by a governing body and received warnings or fines?
- Are the board or senior management dissatisfied with recent safety performance?
- Do your employees express concerns about various health and safety issues?
- How much time are current managers spending filling in the gaps of safety related activities?
These questions are certainly not a black and white indication, but if you answered ‘yes’ to any of them, it could be a risky position to continue without the presence of a health and safety professional. Consider the costs associated with a poor safety performance such as fines, higher insurance premiums, a damaged reputation, time lost due to accidents, reduced motivation and productivity across members of staff, damaged goods or equipment. Unfortunately, in many companies these considerations don’t reach decision makers and the leaky bucket continues.
However, by taking on the right person, and setting up the company to adjust to a new safety culture, you will soon discover that all accidents are preventable and that it is in fact, more expensive to adopt a haphazard approach to safety rather than giving someone full ownership of it as a role.
Getting Your Company Ready for a New Safety Culture
It is unfortunate to say that in some old-fashioned companies, safety managers are still seen as being anally retentive about policies and procedures, rather than being welcomed with open arms into core business functions and decision making. Before adding a safety representative to your team, you should ensure that the company is willing to adapt and embrace a safety culture, even if it is just to see the benefits to the bottom line.
Assess your corporate vision and where you see the company going over the next 3-5 years. Have you included safety related objectives into the company’s key performance indicators? Pay particular attention to areas such as sustainability or corporate social responsibility – globally there is a regulatory trend towards placing greater onus on the corporation for the wellbeing of all workers, including contractors.
Has your company has any incidents or accidents in the past and how have they effected your brand? The impact of such occurrences can be difficult to quantify but your marketing and HR teams have no doubt felt the pressure of them.
Finally, the day-to-day operations of your company should be engineered in a way which achieves as little risk as is possible while still achieving company goals. An analysis of your facilities and processes as well as a measurement of your environmental awareness as a company, may present some requirements for change. A competent safety professional will be able to identify existing and predictable hazards to your employees, the public or the surrounding community and will implement control measures to manage the risk.
GoContractor is an online orientation platform for your contractors and temporary employees. It gives safety professionals peace of mind that everyone on site understands the corporate vision for safety and sustainability as well as the day-to-day hazards around them.
