“Put your glasses on!”
“You forgot your safety glasses!”
These are words that are often repeated over and over at work. Especially when it is done at a site where full PPE is compulsory. It is also then more readily reinforced as there is a penalty should the staff be caught in the act of working without protective gear, while if I remind them, then it is just a quick reminder and I am saving them the pain.
I am Zak from Cape Town, South Africa and I am a Safety Officer.
I do not think that most people understand what a Safety Officer does, what they are supposed to be doing and what safety officers actually end up doing.
One of the things that a Safety Officer is meant to do, is to ensure compliance with the law and with company policy, all legal matters. They need to ensure that everything can pass inspection and create a safety management system that ensures that upon inspection, the company can pass and continue working.
The biggest inspections and safeguard that the Safety Officer is there for is to prove in documentation all the things that the company has done to prevent incidents and accidents – after an accident has happened.
This is where there is inspection upon Policy, Procedure, Training, Supervision, Engineering, Risk Assessment and Inspection Registers. The law requires that the company show and prove that they have done all they can to provide a safe working environment for the employees to work in. That the employees worked in a safe manner with the correct procedures and with a process that was planned, approved and safe.
There needs to be proof that the company did all they could to safeguard the employee against these dangers.
It is not possible to completely remove risks in the workplace, especially when working at height, with heavy loads and with heat. In this case a company, and the Safety Officer, needs to mitigate the hazards that exist.
However, this is not usually what people think the Safety Officer is there for. A lot of people ASSUME that the Safety Officer is there to prevent accidents. Somehow, the Safety Officer is meant to prevent all accidents from happening.
Not true.
The real and technical reason why the Safety Officer exists is to ensure that the employees have a level of supervision to see that they do the work according to the Health and Safety Plan, Safe Work Procedure and Risk Assessment that was trained to the staff.
What most Safety Officers do, in reality, is they are always where the hazard is the worst and the risks are too high. Constantly, they scan the area for dangers that were not planned for or they look at staff, constantly correcting them.
There comes some additional layers to the quotes in the beginning of the post:
On a site where PPE(Personal Protective Equipment) is mandatory, it is easy to enforce.
Do you know where it is not easy to enforce?
In our own workshop or on sites where we work alone and often, scattered like the wind. Most of the time the most senior person on site is a technician and often they only do as they please.
I do not know why people think it is great to work without PPE, as though it makes them more tough or something? All I can say is that it is stupid.
Working without gloves is not brave or Macho. How hard does your hands need to be not to get cut open by sheet-metal? How strong will your eye need to be in order to ward off debris shot into it by a swinging hammer down on a surface?
So I get to say those words a lot, over and over as though I am working with children sometimes. It’s not always like that, but I do deal with a lot of whining.
So that the deal: You make sure the company is not legally liable should something happen and then spend the rest of your time ensuring that nothing happens to the staff who don’t want to follow the rules because those processes take time or are uncomfortable.
This is a glimpse into what I do. Perhaps I will share some more details and/or interesting facts and information.
Thank you for reading! Until then…
Cheers!
