Safety Professionals Responsibility

Safety is not important, until its important, right?

Your Safety Professional is not generating any money towards your project, and is therefore a necessary evil. They just walk around all day with a clipboard and watch other people work. You only have safety team members onsite because it was required in your contract. If you had to work the way they say, you'd never get anything done. The safety guy is just some snot-nosed kid who just got out of college, and has no field experience, so what doe's he know? Safety guys are just police officers who write tickets.

Unfortunately, I have heard all these exclamations before, and sometimes out of the higher ups. What does this do to the morale of your safety team? Safety Professionals should have no fear of doing the right thing. When I first got into safety, one of our experienced guys told me that I would never be the most popular person, and I should never try to be friends with the workers. To a degree, he was right. Part of my job was to stop people from doing things that may get them hurt, in other words doing something wrong. No one likes to be told they are wrong.

Although, through time and patience, the guys in the field learned to trust me. Even though they may not like me personally, they began to understand that what I did was for their benefit. There was no way I was going to tell them how to do their job, but I could show them how to do it safely, with their input. Building this trust is instrumental.

It is our responsibility, as Safety Professionals, to the companies we work for, as well as the employees themselves, to send them home to the families they provide for the same way they came to work for us. Anything less is a failure on our part.

I have investigated only one fatality in my years, and the hardest part was to look into the eyes of the family and know that they had been let down. They sent their loved one to work, but never to return. At that moment, I made this promise to myself: It will not happen on my watch.