The Safety and Health Manager and Function

10 Pages 2492 Words

rous jobs the overall responsibility of the safety manager is enormous considering the hazards and potential hazards that can present a problem to each individual employed within the plant. With so many employees, it is easy to see that a successful safety program is a must.
The interviewee, Ms. Sullivan, has about 7 years experience as a full time employee and is the Safety Manager for Cadbury Adams. As the safety manager, her overall responsibility at this firm is the implementation and execution of all Safety and Health programs (R. Sullivan, personal communication, August 20, 2004). With such broad responsibility it is important to ensure that the right choices are made when it comes to correcting the hazards that actually warrant correcting. Ms. Sullivan cannot afford to spend time trying to correct every hazard or other serious problems may be missed. This is where credibility comes into play. If top management noticed a trend of correcting every small problem within the firm they may lose faith in the safety manager, and any lost of faith will only make her job more difficult. When it came time for management to spend money to correct a serious hazard, they may be more reluctant to do so because of the past trends. The challenge of convincing management to spend the money on correcting hazards starts with credibility. Ms. Sullivan’s way to establish that much needed credibility is to “Be honest and set goals that are attainable but require some stretch to achieve”. If you are not honest with your management than you cannot expect them to be honest with you. Another important avenue is setting the goal, so that management has an idea of planned result. It is the Safety Managers job to detect the hazards that are worth correcting and decide which hazards have priority.
Since we know that all hazards cannot be eliminated, it must be decided which ones are worth correcting. To deal with this obligation of deciding which ha...