For many, choosing and becoming a safety, health and environmental (SHE) professional can be a very stressful calling. At its traditional core, SHE professionals often have to tell their employees and their managers what they can and cannot do in the workplace. These SHE professionals are typically staff positions having responsibilities to advise, recommend, and warn. Thus, SHE professionals are both workplace police officers and workplace parents in many organizations. SHE professionals typically derive the influence for their profession from the regulatory aspects of these oversight roles/relationships, but it often leads unfortunately to strained workplace/working relationships as well as generally negative opinions from stakeholders regarding the profession and its professionals. In addition, some SHE professionals only interact with higher-level management when things have gone wrong or are going wrong, furthering the negative impression by higher-level managers of the SHE profession and its professionals. Also, SHE professionals are often constantly dealing with overcoming organizational barriers (e.g., production barriers; accountability barriers) in order to achieve SHE excellence. SHE professionals have little control over these organizational barriers, except for informing managers of these organization's deficiencies. Since these organizational deficiencies are often under the control of these managers, SHE professionals indirectly indict managers with the information.
With all of this negativity associated with the realities of the SHE profession, it is not surprising that we find many SHE professionals wanting to better fit into their organizations or wanting to be more positively viewed as highly valued employees from a business perspective. This can result in SHE professionals performing their job contrary to the protection of workers by placing higher priorities on organizational self-preservation and self-promotion. These are some of the many workplace drivers that lead SHE professionals being placed in unethical situations in the workplace and being stressed to perform their jobs in less than ethical fashions.
