HR Manager: What Is Your Responsibility for Safety?

The tasks of a Human Resource professional seem to be expanding on an almost daily basis. Managers who left the field twenty years ago wouldn’t recognize the job today. With all that is required, the challenge of setting priorities correctly becomes very important.

One of those priorities needs to be the safety of everyone working for the company. Seems obvious, but often safety is delegated to someone else: the plant manager, a supervisor, or even an assistant in Human Resources. Safety requires lots of paperwork, has lots of compliance issues, and can take up lots of time, so the decision to let someone else handle it is understandable. However, the consequences of a safety policy that is ambivalent, or a workplace that has unsafe areas, are too significant to pass off to someone else.

Where to start? Developing an Injury & Illness Prevention Plan (IIPP) that is tailored to your company’s work environment and physical requirements is a good place. Templates exist that can be customized, providing a roadmap to employees and managers alike on how to prevent injuries, and how to deal with them when they happen. A common problem with IIPP’s is that they are created in a vacuum, and then put on a shelf where they remain untouched for long periods of time. The IIPP should be a living document that is reviewed with employees as the topic of a monthly safety meeting. Safety Training is too often repetitive, while an explanation and discussion of the IIPP can be enlightening and informative. Employees need to know where it’s located, and what is in it.

Safety is measured by injuries and near-misses. One of the most effective ways to reduce injuries in a company is by conveying to employees that management CARES about their safety, and the Human Resource Manager is in a perfect position to carry that message. Safety Incentive Programs and safety achievement awards tell employees that the company they are working for is going the extra mile in their desire to keep everyone injury-free. Safety Training is good and necessary, but is correctly viewed as a requirement. On the other hand, any kind of a safety recognition program goes beyond anything that is required and reinforces the importance of safety to everyone in the company. The HR Manager who proactively takes responsibility for safety is making an exceedingly valuable contribution to the welfare of everyone in the company.


James Parker is an author having experience in writing about Safety Training, safe lifting, Workplace Safety and emergency evacuation procedures ete etc. His articles are fond useful to business firms to get some well experienced safety and security companies as well as some acknowledgement about how to deal in emergency situations. For details visit safetyconsultantsonsite.com