1.3 Your Role in Managing Safely

So far we have talked about "the company". Now we turn to you. As a manager or supervisor you are in the front line of safety. You represent the employer, you decide what happens in your area, and you are in control of what really happens. That makes you a duty holder.

Responsibility leads to accountability. You can hand a task to someone else, but you cannot hand away your accountability for it.

Go back to the serious accident from the start of this module and put yourself in the place of that worker's manager:

• You are accountable for assessing and managing the risks that the worker was exposed to.
• You will have to arrange replacement labour, carry out the accident investigation, tell customers that their orders are delayed, and perhaps deal with enforcement officers, the insurance company and the press.
• You will have to tell the worker's family that he is not coming home tonight.

This course will help you work out your responsibilities and your accountabilities. You need to know when to act and how to act, when not to act, when to pass a matter to a more senior manager, and when you are out of your depth and need to call for help.

1.4 Getting It Right

Health and safety sits on a long list with budgets, discipline, communication, legal and HR matters, leave, resources and targets. But managing safety well helps you with the rest of the list. Good management can:

• improve your reputation
• increase profit
• reduce waste and insurance costs
• keep a team healthy and happy

Treat safety as part of everything the business does, and treat it with the same respect as any other business risk. It is not enough to agree in words. Your actions must match what you say, so:

• think about health and safety when you plan work
• talk about health and safety with your team
• show safe and healthy behaviour yourself

Summary

1. It is important to manage safely because people can be harmed, the law expects it, and the financial and reputational costs of failure are very large.
2. Your role is to assess and control risk in your area, to be accountable for what happens there, and to show the behaviour that you expect of others.

A study aid, not published or endorsed by IOSH or OSHA. Laws and limits differ between countries.