Safety Officer Responsibilities

[Abid Khan]

You might be wondering what your role is as a safety officer if you just started your career as a safety officer and new in the industry. Otherwise, an experienced safety officer does know most of the responsibilities one has to perform as a safety officer by implementing health and safety procedures and providing health and safety training for years.

The safety officer is a versatile job as not all safety officer performs the same tasks. Each industry requires unique safety protocols depending upon the industry and its legal requirements.

A safety officer plays a significant role in the workplace to ensure the safety of every employee, visitors, tools, equipment, and material. The typical responsibilities of a safety officer include providing safety training and guidance, conduct monitoring, reporting and engaging workers in workplace safety.

The most common responsibility of a safety officer in all industries is to ensure that the organization is following and complying with the occupational health and safety legislation, procedures, and guidelines.

This article will not only list the responsibilities of a safety officer but also try to discuss/explain how you can professionally perform your duties.

Key Responsibilities of a Safety Officer

Following are 9 major duties and responsibilities of a Safety Officer.

1. Review existing health and safety policies and procedure

You have to check with your company/organization, whether they already have prepared health and safety policies and procedures. If available, you should review those, including objectives and targets related to health and safety.

If you are working on a site, you should check which procedure applies to your site. Review those to check when you need to conduct a risk assessment, safety inspection, Job safety analysis, etc and what documents you need to maintain.

Most importantly, procedures also include responsibilities that will help you understand your role in your organization.

2. Plan and implement health and safety policies and procedures

If health and safety policies and procedures are not available for your company or your site, you might need to prepare those with the help of your seniors, such as engineer, manager or director. Typical document includes

• HSE Plan
• Emergency Response Plan
• Incident Reporting and Investigating
• Site Safety Rules/Regulations

This is not only it; you should prepare further documents depending on the nature of your organization.

3. Review health and safety rules and legislation

You should check your country’s legislation related to health and safety and adhere to those by including it in your policies and procedures.

4. Plan and conduct Risk Assessment of activities

You should conduct either risk assessment or job safety analysis or job hazard analysis for all the activities going on at your company or site.

5. Provide health and safety training

You should conduct a training needs analysis and prepare training schedule and training presentations. Also provide training as per the training schedule.

6. Report to seniors or Management (Engineer/Manager/director)

It is vital to follow up with seniors and regularly update them regarding health and safety issues, including daily observations.

7. Ensure safety measure are implemented

It includes but not limited to:

• Conduct safety tours and inspection
• Conduct daily meetings with workers to discuss best practices.
• Stop unsafe acts, identify unsafe conditions, and provide safety measures, including the use of protective protection equipment.
• Conduct health and safety audit
• Conduct Emergency Drills
• Conducts toolbox meetings
• PTW monitoring and review

The above activities will help you ensure that safety measures are in place.

8. Prepare incidents or violations reports and determine root causes

Conduct investigation of accidents and near-misses to identify the immediate causes and root causes. Prepare incident reports, including lessons learned and share with seniors/management.

9. Promote health and safety culture

• Be a leader and lead the workforce by following all safety measures yourself.
• Give appreciations and awards.
• Remain consistent, standardize health and safety.

Do you perform all these duties, or are there additional responsibilities on you? Feel free to discuss your responsibilities as a safety officer below.

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