Health and safety professionals today are faced with vast challenges in the workplace — from physical hazards to various psychosocial issues — and industry observers note the level of education they’re getting today may not be providing them enough ammunition to face these challenges.

Training for current and future health and safety practitioners needs to be revisited to ensure that the knowledge and skills being taught are reflective of the realities of the workplace today, according to industry experts participating in a recent discussion on trends and topics that affect the occupational health and safety realm.

“While I think there has been a lot of progress made, in particular with giving credibility to designations such as CRSP, I think we have a long way to go,” says Maureen Shaw, former president of the Industrial Accident Prevention Association (now Workplace Safety and Prevention Services).

“We need to be ensuring that our people who are responsible for leading health and safety in the organization have the ability to look at the workplace in a much broader, higher level.”

Just teaching health and safety professionals the “basics” of OHS management just wouldn’t cut it anymore, says Shaw, because the dynamics of the workplace have vastly changed and the role of the safety manager has changed as well.

Employers today face increasing regulatory obligations with vast consequences to their company’s bottom-line, that they are turning more to field experts for guidance — the health and safety professional — and training plays an important role in making sure that they are ready to take on this new role.

“If we’re going to be looking at health and safety professionals having the ability to influence then they need to have that confidence. There need to be some additions to the training that (safety professionals) get,” says Shaw.

A better understanding of human behaviour, for example, is one area of professional training that needs to be enhanced for the safety practitioner, notes Dave Gouthro, an independent certified health and safety consultant based in Halifax.

Conventional training would tell a would-be OHS manager how to eliminate or minimize a hazard, what to tell workers about workplace hazards, and even the steps to take when a workplace incident or injury occurs.

This kind of knowledge, however, may not be enough for a safety professional to be highly effective at their job, Gouthro says.

“Rules don’t make people do things; it’s getting people to do things the way you want them to do it. I think that’s a better understanding of human behaviour.”

Behaviour-based safety is not a new concept, Gouthro adds, yet it’s not always applied extensively in the workplace. It plays a huge role in how people react in certain situations, and understanding behaviours both from the workers’ side and management side is a skill that an OHS professional should develop.

From advisor to leader
With the evolution of the workplace, has the role of a safety professional evolved as well?

In his role as manager for environmental, health and safety at Toronto Hydro, David Johnston works with a staff of health and safety practitioners, and he says what he finds lacking among these OHS neophytes is leadership.

“I have a great staff here that have graduate degrees, incredibly well-educated. But, man oh man, they have been brainwashed with this ‘advisor role’ so much,” notes Johnston. “It’s what they’re teaching at schools, ‘your job is to advise,’ but it’s not; it’s got to be to lead.”

Johnston says a good safety leader’s role has to go beyond advising and be more of a driver of programs and leading with passion — and they should be developing these leadership skills early on through their educational programs.

“One of the best pieces of advice I got early in my career, from this older semi-retired health and safety professional from a petro-chemical company, and he told me, ‘if you’re going to be a good health and safety manager, you got to put your job on the line at least four times a year.’”

Words of wisdom that to Johnston meant safety leaders need to be passionate enough about what they do that they are prepared to defend it at all cost. It means assuming more of a leadership role than just an advisory role.

Guy Chenard, senior health and safety advisor at Ontario Power Generation, agrees with Johnston’s observation and adds that safety professionals need to, first and foremost, have a good understanding of what their role is in the organization.

“If management requires them to… improve their process or they want to bring down the lost time — I agree with leadership, leadership has to be there — but they have to understand what the role is and how they are going to influence management,” Chenard says.