HR and the safety department

Supporting the safety culture

Most HR professionals don’t readily see the connection between their field and safety, Parent claims. Part of the problem, she said, may be that HR professionals aren’t always interested in doing more than HR-related work – particularly if the employer has a safety professional on staff. In these situations, it’s incumbent on the safety manager to teach HR how it can help support the safety culture.

HR involvement in safety creates an opportunity to improve performance, including through reduced injury costs, Parent said. HR professionals can make an impact by keeping safety in mind when hiring to ensure employees brought on board have the right attitude and can positively contribute to the culture. Parent recommends that employers train all HR professionals on safety basics, including how to complete OSHA injury reports. This is especially important if safety falls under HR duties.

Grandzol notes that such training could help HR professionals understand the connection between occupational safety and workers’ comp – an area that usually falls under HR – and lead them to want to learn more.

Safety managers, on the other hand, don’t necessarily need HR training, according to Parent. However, safety professionals should make sure they’re tapping into the HR infrastructure to use all of the tools in a safety culture, she said.

Organization

Given the potential overlap between a safety and HR professional, can a company make do with one individual doing both tasks?

It depends on the employer, Parent said. In nearly every case, an employer will need an HR manager to handle payroll, benefits and other similar duties. For employers in a low-hazard environment, such as an office building, the HR position likely would cover safety issues. And small employers without the resources to hire a dedicated safety professional will assign the safety responsibility to HR.

However, in a larger company or one with a more high-hazard work environment – a construction site or manufacturing facility, for example – the employer should invest in a separate individual focused on occupational safety.

Otherwise, Boué warned, the HR professional could become overwhelmed covering both HR and safety.

“Understanding all the employment laws and then understanding all the OSHA requirements – it’s a lot to know,” Boué said. “Someone who has to wear both those hats would be quite tasked to really understand all that entails.”

In his experience, Grandzol said, many HR professionals recognize that they know little about occupational safety and breathe a sigh of relief when a safety professional is brought in. Once this happens, however, the two professionals must cooperate.

Parent believes that having the safety professional operating under the HR manager is a natural development, as an employer’s safety program quite often begins inside HR.

If the safety professional reports to the operations manager, a conflict of interest or an “us versus them” mentality can result. Parent compared it to quality control reporting to a production manager – nothing may get done because production will be the priority, not safety or quality.

For cases in which safety personnel does not report to HR, Parent recommends that the department report directly to ownership. Boué suggests that the safety department report to a senior-level employee, such as a vice president, and not a lower-level operations manager because that will leave the department ineffective. And Grandzol recommends the HR and safety professionals report to the same person to ensure the two departments are cooperating.

Regardless of how an employer’s departments are organized, having safety professionals and HR professionals work together is key to improving safety culture. “If you have human resources that’s completely oblivious to safety culture development, or they’re not having any part of, the safety department is just going to be a sideline business and never have any impact,” Parent said.