Sites managers organizational responsibilities

No matter how many environmental professionals an organization has, environmental compliance will not be achieved if the staff is not empowered and supported by management and throughout the company. The responsibilities of the environmental professionals, therefore, must be clearly defined and their authority must be understood throughout the organization. Additionally, if site management is responsible for environmental functions, their role must be elearly defined and they must be held accountable for their actions. In short, the eompany must establish a elear organizational framework that allows environmental staff to be successful. 

The organizational chart further identifies key positions in the project team, including the project director, project manager, site safety and health officer (SSHO), site supervisor, emergency response coordinator, site security, and other specialized positions. 

Management must state clearly a worksite policy on safe and healthful work and working conditions, so that all personnel with responsibility at the site, and personnel at other locations with responsibility for the site, understand the priority of safety and health protection in relation to other organizational values. 

Both interview and questionnaire techniques were used in this survey. Fifty, semi-structured interviews were conducted on-site with a randomly selected, representative, stratified sample of employees. (See Appendix B for an example of some of the prompt questions used in the interview note that this can only be developed after some open interviews/discussion sessions are completed.) A questiormaire was generated from the interview data and distributed to 520 staff to be completed anonymously. This produced a 45 per cent usable response rate for analysis. The objectives were to gain an understanding of the perceptions of quality within the company and readiness for change to provide baseline data for evaluation purposes to identify quality improvement opportunities and potential barriers to change and to help management develop a sense of awareness about quality and quality improvement needs in the plant. The questionnaire included measures of job satisfaction (Warr et aL, 1979), organizational commitment (Porter et al., 1974), perceptions of cooperation and morale in the plant and measures of certain job characteristics associated with quality work performance, such as skill variety, autonomy and feedback (Hackman and Oldham, 1975). 

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