Is the role of a QHSE Manager the career for me?

QHSE, QESH, QUENSH, EHSQ, SHEQ or a similar acronym refer to the areas of responsibility for Quality, Environment, Health & Safety and potentially other management systems used in running an organisation. The days of separate roles for each discipline are getting fewer!

So, what are these responsibilities? Well, Compliance and Conformance are key when running a business; compliance with the legislative requirements and conformance to applicable standards or process requirements. Both are critical to an organisation and as a QHSE Manager the oversight of elements that affect will not be your responsibility alone but will certainly fall, in part, on your shoulders. The QHSE Manager will often be a common element in separate organisational departments, often also bridging the gap between operations and leadership. It’s therefore critical to be competent and effective.

Meeting compliance obligations is a shared responsibility, for something so critical to fall on one individual would be a significant risk. As a QHSE Manager your responsibility is very likely to be to ensure that the mechanism (or management system) for managing compliance is effective. Are there suitable processes in place, is it auditable, is it current etc.

Meeting compliance obligations is a requirement of these standards too. An organisation may be certified to international standards, most commonly ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001. Sometimes organisations will write their own standards that they know are appropriate for their operation. Ensuring conformance to these standards, internal or external, will fall squarely into the remit of the QHSE Manager.

Communicating the requirements of standards, helping process owners meet them and holding them to account when they don’t can be a challenge and one that presents different obstacles daily. Dealing with these obstacles with a considered and collaborative attitude is the goal; change achieved through consent will always be more effective and QHSE managers know that an effective change first time is one that won’t need further attention.

Auditing is clearly a key requirement of establishing conformance. Carrying out effective internal audits and managing your third-party certification or surveillance audits will be part of your routine. In larger organisations a QHSE Manager is more likely to manage an internal audit team than carry out audits themselves but it is always good to ‘get your hands dirty’ every now and again.

Sometimes collaboration doesn’t meet the need. In this situation good decision making and firm instructions might be required – but make sure your assertions and decisions are backed by evidence – a poorly conducted audit will leave your evidence in question and your decisions open to challenge.

Increasingly QHSE managers are using standards to drive business improvement using the audit fundamentals of Plan – Do – Check – Act and in doing so making the role, and themselves, indispensable to the growth of organisations.

Whether building consensus or challenging inefficiency the role of a QHSE Manager is a valuable, challenging and hugely rewarding one. It will never be mundane, often gives fascinating insight into business performance and is respected throughout organisations. Critically with a keen analytical eye and some sector experience this is a career that is open to many of us. Feel free to call iqms Learning today for discussion and advice on your future career as a QHSE Manager.