In your current role have you been involved with facilities or human resources? Do logistics or operations come into your remit? What about sales and marketing, finance and contractor management?
It’s a fact that many property and facilities managers have chosen this as a career, and there are a range of professional, vocational and academic routes of entry. However, it is just as true that many people find themselves with property and facilities management responsibilities due to the existing role that they have, and by default they take on more and more safety responsibility. Maybe they didn’t step forward at all, but just weren’t quick enough at taking a step backwards?
Should safety management be the sole function of FM, or HR, or Finance, or Operations or any other department you care to think of? Isn’t it a corporate responsibility that sits across all departments, with all functional managers having some responsibility for its effective management, with leadership and direction from the very top?
The facilities manager may have clear insight and day to day control over many areas of business such as facilities, security, catering, building fabric and the like, but what control do they actually have over staff travel arrangements, the company car fleet, logistics, staff welfare and sickness absence, corporate entertainment, operations?
By trying to allocate safety management to an individual role such as FM, surely the whole ethos of effective safety management and ownership is lost, diluted and made less effective, as those with control and who make business decisions on process, procedure and direction fail to grasp the fact that they are responsible for safety management whether they wear that hat or not?
We need to ensure that policy and arrangements accurately reflect the real allocation of responsibility, and make sure there is a robust training plan in place in order that roles and responsibilities are clearly understood.
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It suits facilities managers to adopt health and safety responsibilities. It opens up a whole new range of career opportunities for them.
As an environmental health officer by profession, in a profession where historically we were jack of all trades , master of none, I am not surprised at this trend.
Most subjects which make up ënvironmental health”, i.e. food safety, health and safety, pest control, air pollution, water and waste water are gradually disappearing and being carried by so called specialists. Even health and safety professionals have decided in the last ten years that they experts in the environment.
The term EHS is bandied around without thought.
HR, management, whoever, don’t really care in many cases who caries out health and safety particularly if it saves money.
Thus many facilities managers have decided they are health and safety professionals. It’s insidious.
I recently looked at a job in Kazakstan which was essentially food safety and health and safety in a camp or camps for oil company workers.
The recruiters asked for facilities managers. Since when has someone whose job it is to look after an office block or a shopping mall qualified to carry out either of these functions?
Hi Paul, totally agree with your viewpoint. There is a worrying trend across many companies these days to “outsource, outsource, outsource” as much as possible and at the lowest cost. This is particularly the case under the remit of facilities management where companies hiring an FM provider think they are effectively washing their hands of the need to manage their environmental or health & safety issues themselves. This is a short-sighted approach and in our view is an accident waiting to happen. It also goes contrary to the spirit of management systems, where the emphasis should be on leadership and integrating safety into a company’s work culture and even business practices. Indeed the new ISO 14001 standard and the draft ISO H&S Standard will both renew this focus. Regards, Tjeerd