What does a SHEQ Coordinator do?

To begin with, the acronym stands for Safety, Health, Environment and Quality. In broad terms, a SHEQ Coordinator is responsible for compliance with health and safety regulations, environmental regulations, and quality control, developing and implementing policies and procedures that align with regulatory requirements and industry best practices.

Understanding the role and responsibilities of a SHEQ Coordinator

At Poundfield Precast, one of the main responsibilities of our SHEQ Coordinator is to protect employees’ health and safety, ensuring appropriate guidance is being followed at all times. In doing so, our aim is to prevent accidents and protect the business, by ensuring compliance with health and safety rules and regulations.

Their typical responsibilities include:

• Designing and maintaining SHEQ systems
• Ensuring health and safety, environmental and quality standards are met on-site
• Identifying potential hazards
• Completing risk assessments and on-site inspections
• Suggesting improvements to working processes
• Ensuring staff understand safety procedures
• Checking equipment is safe
• Compiling statistics for reports and presentations
• Monitoring environmental impacts
• Developing and reviewing safety policies and procedures and maintaining all documentation
• Advising and training staff on best working practices
• Investigating accidents or incidents and writing reports
• Liaising with inspectors

The SHEQ Coordinator works across all levels of the business, liaising on SHEQ objectives to promote a collective effort towards achieving them. We endeavour to take a proactive approach to SHEQ management, rather than reactive, and our Coordinator does this by actively engaging with the production team.

Why is the role important for Poundfield?

With an ongoing cycle of change and continuous improvement, Safety, Health, Environment and Quality need to be proactively managed. On top of day-to-day tasks, keeping abreast of changes to regulations and ensuring the business is prepared for HSE inspections is a full-time role which is taken very seriously.

Demonstrating good SHEQ practice is also important for our clients, who want to be reassured that health & safety law, environmental practices and quality management systems are being followed. We often create health and safety packs specifically for our client’s projects and provide them with certificates and evidence to demonstrate that Poundfield are practising good SHEQ management.

Quality control is a critical component of any successful organisation. Working closely with our Quality Manager, the SHEQ Coordinator is responsible for monitoring and evaluating quality control measures to uphold these standards and will provide support with audits and inspections which are conducted to assess the company’s compliance with Quality Management system ISO 9001.

Training and educating staff on SHEQ practices

An integral part of the role is ensuring that employees are trained and competent in their job. Our SHEQ Coordinator does this by organising regular training sessions, workshops, refresher training and toolbox talks. This will cover topics such as hazard identification, emergency response procedures and good environmental practices.

We have also introduced two dedicated training days per year where production stops. These include ‘Safe Start’, which takes place on the first day back after the Christmas holiday, to bring health and safety fully into focus for the year ahead and a ‘Pit Stop’ training day which takes place in the summer and covers the 5 core risks on site.

What skills and qualifications are needed to be a SHEQ Coordinator?

At Poundfield, our SHEQ Coordinator deals with a wide variety of people across the business from Managers to trainees working in production. Therefore, a good level of ‘people skills’ combined with effective communication, both written and verbal, are crucial for conveying SHEQ information effectively.

An educational background in disciplines such as occupational health and safety, environmental management, or quality assurance, is highly advantageous. Additionally, possessing relevant certifications, such as from NEBOSH (National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health) and knowledge or experience of ISO 9001 or ISO 14001, Quality and Environmental Management systems is highly beneficial.

Prevention is better than cure

Identifying potential risks is one of the key ways to prevent accidents and near misses. Everyone working at Poundfield is actively encouraged to report anything that they are concerned about, which has in turn led to simple changes being implemented to make the site safer for everyone.

As a business, we are committed to investing in Health & Safety and are focussed on Environmental, Social and Governance matters. Implementing SHEQ policies and introducing systems of work helps ensure that our precast concrete products meet the highest quality standards and that working conditions are as safe as realistically possible.