Role Of The Safety Professional In The Workplace
A safety professional helps a work organization safeguard its workers, reducing the frequency of illnesses and injuries. This role includes ensuring that the workforce receives training in many safety practices. Increasingly, a safety professional serves as an important consultant or as a direct member of the management team.
Assist a Changing Workforce • The safety professional has to protect a new kind of workforce that differs from workforces of the last few decades of the 20th century. Today's workforce works with reduced oversight in a flatter organization, which means that even line workers have more direct responsibilities and accountability for safety oversight. That's because flatter organizations have fewer managers and supervisors at every level and fewer levels between executives and line workers. Employees with more-complex jobs belong either to the aging segment of baby boomers or younger generations with less experience.
Communication
• A safety professional must comprehend an organization's power structure and human dynamics to select the most effective means of communicating safety concerns. She encourages employees to prevent accidents by identifying safety practices they should develop in their own work areas. Once they develop practices by writing down specific procedures, they use a standard protocol for communicating them to the safety office for documentation.
Setting Deadlines
• Safety professionals must set deadlines that managers must follow in every operational area to conform to the organizational safety plan. Each year, managers review all of their assigned safety practices, related laws, policies and procedures, equipment, inspections and documentation of training programs and credentials. They submit results of their review to the safety professional. It's his responsibility to follow up with non-compliant managers and departments, for example, by issuing warnings and notifying the senior leadership team of how long the operational area has to become compliant.
Job Task Analysis
• An important part of ensuring that the workplace develops comprehensive policies and procedures, including administrative controls, involves studying the specific job tasks of each position. A safety professional may observe workers at work in their typical settings and identify safety practices, such as the use of personal protective equipment. Through specific job-task analysis and documentation of all practices, both observed and recommended, the safety professional ensures the overall safety program is strengthened.
Assist a Changing Workforce • The safety professional has to protect a new kind of workforce that differs from workforces of the last few decades of the 20th century. Today's workforce works with reduced oversight in a flatter organization, which means that even line workers have more direct responsibilities and accountability for safety oversight. That's because flatter organizations have fewer managers and supervisors at every level and fewer levels between executives and line workers. Employees with more-complex jobs belong either to the aging segment of baby boomers or younger generations with less experience.
Communication
• A safety professional must comprehend an organization's power structure and human dynamics to select the most effective means of communicating safety concerns. She encourages employees to prevent accidents by identifying safety practices they should develop in their own work areas. Once they develop practices by writing down specific procedures, they use a standard protocol for communicating them to the safety office for documentation.
Setting Deadlines
• Safety professionals must set deadlines that managers must follow in every operational area to conform to the organizational safety plan. Each year, managers review all of their assigned safety practices, related laws, policies and procedures, equipment, inspections and documentation of training programs and credentials. They submit results of their review to the safety professional. It's his responsibility to follow up with non-compliant managers and departments, for example, by issuing warnings and notifying the senior leadership team of how long the operational area has to become compliant.
Job Task Analysis
• An important part of ensuring that the workplace develops comprehensive policies and procedures, including administrative controls, involves studying the specific job tasks of each position. A safety professional may observe workers at work in their typical settings and identify safety practices, such as the use of personal protective equipment. Through specific job-task analysis and documentation of all practices, both observed and recommended, the safety professional ensures the overall safety program is strengthened.
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