The safety profession has made a long and difficult journey to get to where it is today. Throughout that journey self-improvement and professional acceptance have been two key issues. A third issue that little has been written about is the use and training of collateral or additional duty safety personnel. These personnel are often referred to as safety officers and this term describes an individual who is less than a full-time safety person. The personnel who fill these positions are not considered by many to be the well trained, full-time, professional that most want as the model safety professional. However, in spite of being part-time, they are often hard working men and women who perform safety duties in addition to another set of duties. How much time they spend on safety depends on the type and size of the organization, work complexities, and the overall accident risk of the organization.
This presentation provides a logical process for selecting, training and motivating a safety officer so that he or she will go beyond the minimum standard to a continued effort of improvement for the safety program. This process is based on research and analyses conducted by the author and has been verified through personal opinion surveys and interviews. In addition, the presentation is based on the book, "Basic Safety Administration: A Handbook for the New Safety Officer," written by the author. This presentation is designed to provide managers and safety professionals who select, train, and supervise safety officers with information that will allow them to significantly improve their use.
The author entered the safety profession based on experiences gained from serving as a collateral duty safety person for a state agency. From that background a fifteen-year effort was undertaken to determine how to select and train these personnel when and if management decides to use them. The search was often a long and fruitless one. The author made a detailed search and read selected texts on safety and adult learning. Several libraries and the World Wide Web were used for the literature search with no success. Feedback was also obtained from safety professionals about the use of additional or collateral duty safety personnel. Additional feedback was obtained from third party individuals who were not associated with safety to discuss the use of additional or collateral duty personnel. As with any subject prior research and publications can assist in the implementation and improvement of future endeavors into that area. In the case of using safety officers there is little or no information that one can fall back on to save time and energy in while trying to improve the safety program. The author's primary interest was and is to provide initial assistance to newly appointed safety officers. Due to the limited information the author found on this subject he wrote a book designed to fill this void and provide assistance to this newly appointed person. This book was published in April 1998 by the American Society of Safety Engineers.
