As a key Environmental Health & Safety Manager at a company site, you and your employer both may not realize how crucial your input is to the economic and administrative aspects of the business. Here are a few parts of your daily workload to highlight in meetings with upper-level management so that you can boost your standing within the company and make overall positive changes for everyone involved.
- Compliance. Administrators and legal staff within your company are already aware of the guidelines that need to be followed for full compliance. But without active EHS interaction, they can’t put necessary measures in place. Your role functions as a go-between, taking the mandated regulations and applying them in ways that will only make sense if they’re carried out by someone familiar with workplace hazards.
- Risk Management. Well-intentioned programs have lots of room to go awry if they are not implemented properly. Without you in place to help understand hazard statements, safety data sheets, and overall work risk environment factors, new programs in the workplace can prove dangerous and/or costly as they struggle to match the exact specifications of the workspace that they hadn’t properly been designed for.
- Return On Safety (ROS). Without a specialized environmental health & safety expert on hand, your company would be lost when it comes to maximizing their safety investments. Only you have the unique skills to help design the safest and most cost-effective program for your specific company. Because you know the managerial and the manufacturing sides of your company well, you’ll be able to help implement a program that makes sense at all levels of the business, saving money while safeguarding against accidents.
With these three duties in mind, try your best to emphasize how crucial you are to the company’s structure. Your partnership in the business is well-earned and well-deserved, and you and the company will both benefit when you are given input on important decisions and strategizing. Bringing EHS acumen to upper levels of the company can do nothing but help, so don’t sell yourself short!
