Responsibility for the work environment stays with the employer. What gets allocated are the duties: to investigate, assess, act and follow up. A manager who has taken them on needs to know exactly what they are, because it is the allocation that decides what is expected of that role the day something actually happens.
Four things an allocation needs to hold
- 1
It goes to a person, not to a job title
An allocation that points at a box on an organisation chart reaches nobody. It has to go to someone by name, who knows they have received it.
- 2
Whoever receives it knows what the duties mean
The knowledge requirement is part of the allocation. A manager who has never been told what systematic work environment management demands cannot judge when it is failing either.
- 3
Authority and resources come with it
The duty to remedy a risk is useless without the mandate to order the work and a budget to pay for it. If those did not come along, the allocation has not been made.
- 4
It can be handed back
Where the time, the money or the mandate falls short, the duty has to be returnable to someone who can decide about them. An allocation with no way back out is a placing of blame, not a division of work.
Work environment responsibility is not the same as criminal liability
An allocation of duties moves tasks, not blame. Who can be held to account after an accident is decided afterwards, by what that person was actually in a position to do. If the authority or the resources never followed the duty, having the name on the paper does not help – and conversely, whoever really directed the work can end up answering for it with no allocation naming them at all. That is why the allocation has to reflect how the work is genuinely organised.
What a manager needs to be able to show
- Which work environment duties are allocated to the role, and by whom
- That the risks in their own operation have been investigated and assessed, and when that was last done
- Which measures have been decided, who is to carry them out and by when
- How incidents and accidents are received, investigated and reported back to the people concerned
- That employees have the knowledge and instructions the work requires before it starts
- When duties have been handed back, and what happened next
Handing a duty back is a measure, not a defeat
A manager without the resources to remedy a risk is meant to hand the duty back to whoever can decide about the resources. It sounds dramatic and is in practice an email. The point is that the decision is then taken where the money is, and that nobody has to work out afterwards who knew what. How to word a hand-back so that it serves as both the measure and the record is one of the things the training covers.
Common questions from managers
- Is BAM enough for a manager?
- BAM gives the grounding everyone needs, but it cannot say what your particular allocation contains. That part always belongs to the organisation, and it is the part usually missing on the day the Work Environment Authority asks.
- We allocated the duties verbally. Does that count?
- A verbal allocation can hold, but it is hard to show and easily remembered differently. The regulations on systematic work environment management also require a written allocation in organisations with at least ten employees.
- Can management allocate away its own responsibility?
- No. Management answers for the allocation having been made to someone with the knowledge, the authority and the resources, and for following up that it works in practice. That responsibility cannot be delegated onwards.
Do you know what your allocation says?
Get in touch and we will go through it as it stands today, before anyone has to dig it out for other reasons.
See the work environment courses