INTRODUCTION

As a business owner or manager, you have ultimate accountability for the safety and health of your employees.  You cannot delegate this accountability to others in your company.  You can, however, expect others to share the responsibility for certain elements of the safety and health program.

If you own or manage a small operation, you may be questioning why you should share the responsibility for safety and health.  You have a strong working knowledge of your organization's problems, and you are close to your employees.  However, as your business grows and your workforce increases, being responsible for all the details of an effective safety and health program may become less feasible.  It will be important to have a mechanism for delegating some of that responsibility.

For managers of large organizations, a method of clearly assigning safety and health responsibilities, authority and resources is an absolute necessity.

We recommend that you make use of written job descriptions.  These documents can effectively:

• Clarify the specific safety and health responsibilities and authority of individuals, and
• Distribute responsibilities between supervisors and rank and file employees.

In this Chapter we discuss how to develop useful job descriptions that spread safety and health responsibilities throughout your organization.  You will need to:

• Review your existing organizational structure,
• Decide what part each position should play in your total safety and health program and what level of authority and resources will be needed,
• Decide and assign the responsibilities for each position, and
• Discuss assigned responsibilities with the people involved.

NOTES

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