If we asked, "Who's responsible for health and safety in your business?", what would the answer be?
- The Managing Director?
- HR?
- Operations?
- The person who has somehow ended up looking after the risk assessments?
- Or perhaps everyone would point at someone different.
It's a simple question, but the answer isn't always as straightforward as you might think.
Ultimately, responsibility starts at the top
Employers have a legal responsibility to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees and anyone else who may be affected by their work. That responsibility doesn't disappear because you've appointed a Health & Safety Manager or brought in an external consultant.
Senior leaders still need to make sure appropriate arrangements are in place. But that doesn't mean they need to know everything themselves. Businesses need access to competent health and safety advice, whether that knowledge sits within the organisation or comes from external support. The important part is making sure somebody has the right knowledge, experience and time to help manage health and safety properly.
What happens in smaller businesses?
In many SMEs, health and safety isn't someone's entire job. It often forms part of another role.
Perhaps your Operations Manager looks after it. Maybe it sits with HR. Or one of your Directors has taken responsibility because they've always been the person who deals with it.
There's nothing automatically wrong with that. The question is whether that person has what they need to do the job properly.
- Do they have enough knowledge?
- Have they had appropriate training?
- Do they have enough time?
- Do they know where to go when something falls outside their experience?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, it's worth looking at where additional support might be needed.
Being responsible doesn't mean doing everything yourself.
This is an important distinction.
Someone within your business might oversee health and safety without personally completing every risk assessment, delivering every training session or knowing the answer to every technical question. Their role might instead be to make sure the right things happen. That means knowing when something can be managed internally and recognising when specialist advice is needed. Trying to know everything isn't the goal.
Knowing when to ask for help is much more useful.
Building knowledge within your team
For some businesses, the next step is developing more health and safety knowledge internally.
Training can give employees and managers a much stronger understanding of workplace risks and how they should be managed.
Qualifications such as the NEBOSH National General Certificate can be particularly useful for people who have health and safety responsibilities as part of a wider role. It gives them the knowledge and confidence to understand risk, challenge poor practices and make better-informed decisions. But training someone internally doesn't mean they will never need outside support again.
There will always be situations where specialist knowledge or an independent perspective is useful.
When external support makes sense
You might decide that you don't need a full-time health and safety professional within the business. But you may still need regular access to one. That's where retained support can work particularly well.
An external consultant can work alongside the person responsible internally, providing additional expertise, reviewing what is in place and helping when more complex situations arise.
Rather than replacing your internal team, they support them.
And over time, because they understand your organisation, they can help you take a more proactive approach instead of only getting involved when something has gone wrong.
Health and safety works best when everyone understands their role
While employers carry the overall responsibility, good health and safety doesn't sit with one person. Managers need to lead it. Employees need to follow procedures, report concerns and speak up when something doesn't look right. And whoever coordinates health and safety needs the knowledge, time and support to do their job effectively.
If you're not sure who is responsible for what within your organisation, that's probably a useful place to start.
At Serene Safety, we can help you understand what your business needs, whether that's developing knowledge within your team through training or providing ongoing support through our retained health and safety service.
Because the answer shouldn't be:
"I'm not sure. I think Dave deals with that."
It should be clear who does what, where they can get support and how health and safety fits into the way your business operates every day.
Simple advice, simply delivered.
