Hire An Internal Safety Manager Or Outsource OSHA Compliance?

Are you a small company trying to decide whether to hire an in-house safety manager or outsource your OSHA compliance? Are your goals OSHA compliance and avoidance of OSHA fines and penalties, and protecting your workforce?

Or are you also concerned about environmental compliance and avoidance of TCEQ and EPA fines and penalties? Whether you’re goals include both OSHA and environmental compliance, hiring an in-house EHS manager is no guarantee of compliance or success. I’ve learned this the hard way and created this brief blog post to discuss the issue and challenges.

I’ve been recruiting, hiring and managing environmental, health and safety professionals for many years, both for my own companies, and for clients. For a beginner, it’s a daunting and difficult task, and the chances of first time success are unfortunately low. Here’s why:

Here are the main challenges that companies typically face when hiring a Safety or EHS manager:

Difficulties involved in vetting candidate qualifications:
- Once you post an advertisement, your inbox will be bombarded with resumes. Depending on your required skill sets and qualifications, you’ll soon find out how difficult it is to sort through and determine good candidates vs. bad ones. The more experience you need, the harder the task becomes. You’ll begin to notice that resumes are filled with all kinds of training certifications with long names and numbers, professional certifications (ie: CSP, CIHST, CIH, etc…). Unless you really understand what all of these certifications mean, it becomes impossible to really vet candidates.
- Then you’ll likely start to look at formal education. You’ll likely find very few with solid 4-year undergrad and graduate degrees from reputable universities. Instead you’ll begin to see a bunch of “university” names that you’ve never heard of before. If you take the time to search on-line, you’ll quickly learn that many are “on-line” “universities”, and then how are you supposed to know which one’s are “good” vs. “bad.”
- You’ll also notice that many candidates will have lots of job-hopping on projects in far-flung places around the country and sometimes the world. What does this mean? You might ask yourself, where are all of the candidates with good, long-term stability at local reputable companies? This is all true and if you decided to try and recruit an EHS professional, I promise that all of this uncertainty and difficulty will quickly overwhelm you.
Difficulty in overseeing/managing EHS manager if senior management doesn’t have expertise in EHS rules, regulations and requirements: If you’re lucky enough to find a good candidate and hire them, how do you plan to manage, oversee and evaluate their work? Unless you or one of your senior leaders have a good EHS background, this task becomes difficult if not impossible, as I learned the hard way. Essentially you’ll be reduced to “trusting” and “hoping” that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do in an effort to get your company OSHA and environmentally compliant, and maintain your EHS compliance. Often times, companies end up getting fined by OSHA or an environmental agency, only to learn that their EHS manager wasn’t keeping up, and unfortunately you had no way of knowing until the regulators showed up at the front door.
Most EHS professionals either specialize in health & safety (OSHA) or environmental compliance (EPA and state environmental agency). Qualified “generalists” who have good experience & education in both disciplines are very rare (and expensive). Even if you’re able to find a good candidate, they’ll still have limitations and so your company will probably still need to seek outside consultants to deal with various issues (especially environmental compliance/air).
Compensation: A good, qualified and experienced OSHA compliance manager will typically demand over $80,000 per year if not more. A good “generalist” who has environmental experience (VERY RARE) will want $125,000 or more. Many less qualified and experienced will want the same, if not more, and if you’re not able to properly vet them, you may end up making the mistake of over-paying them only to learn later that they did nothing to improve your environmental, health and safety compliance position.
Accountability: If you do end up getting an OSHA or environmental fine due to poor performance from your EHS manager, what now? Do you fire them and start the process all over again by trying to find a new person? It’s a tough call, especially if you’ve been paying them well and trusting that they were doing their job.

So what’s a small company to do?

Our outsourced and virtual EHS management service can solves these problems:

You’ll have access to our entire team of environmental, health and safety professionals who can address virtually any EHS issue. See our Team page here: https://bes-corp.com/contact-us/our-team/
Our annual cost is a fraction of the cost of a full time employee
Accountability: we will guarantee your OSHA compliance after 6 months.
And more,…..

Learn more by calling 512-457-0374 or Click Here To Learn More About ASSURED COMPLIANCE

By Russell Carr|2022-03-21T12:50:51-05:00March 13th, 2016|Good To Know|Comments Off

About the Author: Russell Carr

How A Sales Guy Transformed Into An Environmental, Health & Safety Expert & Advocate For Small Businesses I've spent my entire 30+ year career working within the manufacturing and “industrial services” sectors. The first 15 years of my career focused on sales of hazardous materials related products and services to the manufacturing sector, then for the last 16+ years transitioned into entrepreneurship, founding 3 small industrial services related contracting businesses. As you’ll see below, running these companies eventually lead me to found yet a 4th business, but more on that in a minute…. Here’s a brief description of the first 3 companies: Berg Environmental Services, Inc.: hazardous waste disposal & transportation services, founded in August of 2003 3rd party wind energy operations & maintenance services provider to utility scale wind farms throughout the US, founded in September 2007 3rd party oil & gas exploration & production services provider, founded in August of 2011 Each of these companies operated in extremely dangerous working conditions and exposed my employees to a wide range of serious health & safety hazards on a daily basis. To complicate matters, 2 of the companies also exposed the environment to significant potential harm. In other words, I learned very early the critical importance of managing environmental, health and safety issues so as to ensure the safety of our employees and the environment, as well as minimizing related risks. But I also learned how incredibly difficult and challenging this endeavor can be due to the wide range of complicated and continually changing environmental, health and safety rules and regulations that impacted the companies. To summarize the challenges: First I had to determine which regulations applied to each company, then I had to build compliance programs to meet those regulations, and finally I had to ensure that the programs were being managed and followed by our staff on a daily basis. All while trying to run and grow 3 profitable businesses…. It was overwhelming and I always struggled to keep up. To make matters worse, throughout this time I also witnessed the devastating price that companies, management and ownership can pay for failing to manage EHS compliance. This included seeing one of my hazardous waste management clients get sent to jail over environmental issues, another client’s management team threatened with jail time, a direct competitor get fined $378,000 by OSHA fine after an employee was nearly killed, and many others face major fines and penalties. Full disclosure, one of my companies got fined by OSHA at one point, & another was cited by TCEQ, so I know how it feels. In summary, I learned first hand how incredibly difficult it is for small companies to manage EHS compliance due to a common lack of the critical expertise, time and resources that are needed to keep up, and how this situation then ends up exposing them to these potentially catastrophic risks that can literally destroy lives and businesses. This later inspired me to found my 4th company, Berg Compliance Solutions in 2012, which is dedicated to helping other small businesses, and business owners, to manage EHS compliance and risk. Education BA, Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder, December, 1990. Summary of Professional Experience & Qualifications: 30+ years serving the manufacturing & industrial services sectors 30+ years of sales and marketing experience 16+ years as small business owner & entrepreneur: Founded and operated 4 small businesses since 2003. Environmental, Health & Safety Compliance & Program Related: 19 plus years of hazardous waste management including EPA, TCEQ & RCRA regulations 8 years of DOT/FMCSA compliance experience, including hazardous materials transportation 8 years of combined experience implementing and managing OSHA health and safety compliance programs for 2 high risk energy services businesses Successfully implemented and gained ISO 9001 Quality Management Certification and OHSAS 18001 (Occupational Health & Safety Advisory Service) Certification for wind energy maintenance business. Regulatory Enforcement Related Experience: Served as expert witness in criminal environmental compliance enforcement cases Superfund-CERCLA OSHA enforcement inspections, investigations and resolution in following industries: industrial services, manufacturing & construction. TCEQ enforcement inspections, investigations and resolution in manufacturing.