Maintaining a safe work environment requires vigilance. There are always competing priorities that force tough business decisions where we must guard against anything that might distract us from our safety culture and focus.
A common challenge for business managers in all disciplines is identifying what you should delegate and what you should not. A few simple tests for when to delegate include:
- • Are you spending energy and time on things that are not your core competency?
- • Do you have options for delegation that can produce the desired results?
- • Are there activities currently required of higher priority in your core competency?
I find a real estate valuation principle helpful in delegation decisions; “Highest and Best Use.” Just like a real estate investor wants to use property for the property’s highest and best use to receive the best value, so should we seek to use our work time for it’s highest and best use.
Ask yourself, “What should I be doing that produces the most value to my business?”
The biggest obstacle to staying focused on your highest and best use of time is usually a perceived lack of people to whom you can delegate all the things that just need to be done. There’s a lot to do and somebody has to do it.
I recognized this problem in the safety arena and decided I could offer solutions that would make a big improvement by helping safety managers stay focused on safety.
My company started as a safety consulting firm and after many years of seeing how much time both we and our clients spent on finding, recruiting, hiring, managing and transitioning all the various safety roles in the industrial and heavy commercial work place, I saw the light. ResponsAble Safety Staffing was born with a new mission.
We help safety leaders stay focused on safety by providing experienced professional safety resources focused only on safety staffing.
Think for a moment about the activities involved to find, recruit, hire, manage and transition between jobs for all your safety related roles. While critical to your success, those activities are not related to safety.
Staffing all of your safety roles takes a tremendous amount of time which distracts you from your highest and best use, safety.
Some people haven’t stopped to take inventory of the activities that go into staffing safety roles through a typical business cycle so I’ll summarize to make the point.
A typical project will include these fundamental steps and the associated time to get a safety team in place.
Developing and Publishing a good Position Description
Effective recruiting for any position requires a good job description to facilitate clear communication and expectations from initial recruiting contact and on to performance management should a candidate be hired. A Position Description or Job Description also supports the development of a Job Post
Creating an effective Job Post
A Job Post is distinct from a Job Description in that the Job Post is usually shorter, focuses on the highlights and includes some favorable descriptions of the employer and work environment. An effective Job Posting will draw far more qualified and desirable candidates than a long, dry job description or poorly worded job post.
Posting Jobs
A Job Post isn’t likely to be effective if you don’t post it in the right places, in the right formats and promoted the right way. Various job boards have differing applications and it can take some time to learn the ins and outs.
Interviewing Candidates
Interviewing involves many steps in itself but I have lumped them all in an attempt to stay brief. Contacting, screening and personal interviews are all required to navigate an interview of any one candidate for a job. When you need more than one or two employees for a job, interviewing can become very time consuming and difficult to manage.
Testing Prospects
A good hiring process should include testing and evaluation to assure only qualified candidates make it onto a job site. At ResponsAble we test all candidates and require acceptable passing criteria before they can progress in the hiring process. The testing and confirming of credentials gets even more complicated and time consuming if you are hiring for diverse roles on a project.
Hiring Employees
Our clients incur a high cost every time they hire an employee. Beyond the steps outlined above, the additional overhead cost associated with insurance, administrative processing requirements, and other benefits can total 50% of the employee’s salary.
Transitioning Employees
For project employees who may not stay for full career employment, you typically have costs and time to transition them out of a given role. Sort of like unwinding the process costs to hire the employee to start.
The fundamental steps to hire employees to support a project of any size just takes a lot of time. I can feel the man hours piling up even written in abbreviated form as I’ve done here.
So if you are a Safety Director or Safety Manager and want to keep your safety staff focused on Safety, ask yourself, “Are the recruiting and hiring steps for project safety staff the highest and best use of my or the team’s time?”
There are competent resources available to carry the burden of building a project safety team. I have built my entire business upon carrying these burdens for our clients. Consider delegating the staffing process for your industrial or heavy commercial project to people who specialize in doing just that.
If you think there might be a way to place more focus on Safety rather than the administration of recruiting and hiring, I’m happy to talk to you about how we can help.
