Health and Safety Manager

Health and Safety Manager 

Manchester 

45k 

This advert is a little bit unusual. It’s in blocks of text. It hasn’t got many bullet points. There’s a section for “what you might NOT like about the job”, as well as things you might like.

Oh, and it actually tells you something about the job. Which is a real job.

Please read the advert before you apply. It’s not as dull as most adverts though.

Promise.

The Job 

You’re the Health and Safety Manager for three small food manufacturing sites. You’ll be based out of Manchester, and two of the sites are in Manchester. The third is in London.

They’re good little sites. One of them was bought in 2020, and has had a full refurb. The shell building is old but the insides are brand new. Another is basically another plastic box inside a building. The third is quite interesting – a relatively old building, but really well kept – however (and unusually for a food site) they even still have tiled walls!

Each site has between 50 and 60 people on them. They’re primarily supplying food service, so you don’t have retailers auditing your sites every five seconds.

They’re part of a larger group, so you’ve got a solid central team to support you and provide training and development as well. The Group HSE Manager is based in Manchester as well (though not under your feet!), so you’ll have easy access.

A few nice things about these sites: 

• They don’t produce on the weekend (so you won’t have to traipse around them at the weekend).
• They don’t produce at night (so you won’t have to traipse around them at night).
• They’re smaller and you can get your arms around them.
• Two of them are dead close to each other. So you don’t spend hours in the car.

What you might not like 

Because you’re responsible for three sites, you’ll have to spend some time going to London. But you might love that. And you’ll have a company credit card, so you won’t have to carry any of the costs yourself. Plus the train is pretty fast.

The pay doesn’t sound great for a multisite role. True, there are better paying jobs. The role reports into the Group HSE Manager. You’ll be covering the three smallest sites. It’ll give you autonomy (because you’ll need it!), as well as support and development. But if you’re on 55k already, probably wouldn’t make sense to apply. 

It isn’t fully remote. There’s a bit of flexibility on this – you can work from home every now and then when you need to get things done. However, it’s pretty hard to walk around a factory from home so you will be site based most of the time. 

You! 

You’ll need experience. If you’ve got a few years experience working in Health and Safety in the following industries:

• Food manufacturing
• Distribution
• Manufacturing
• Armed Forces

This is health and safety, so you will need some qualifications. NEBOSH diploma, or NVQ Level 5 would be ideal. If you’re one below that and have the right experience and really want to learn and develop in HSE, then let me know.

The sites you’re covering are basically satellite sites. Because of that, they don’t necessarily have a full management team onsite. That means you’ll spend time coaching, mentoring and influencing the people onsite.

They’ll want to do something. Here’s a real example:

Friday afternoon. A line is down. They need to bring in a welder to do the work, and want to bring him in over the weekend so they can produce first thing Monday morning. They ideally want to just let him in and leave him be. This is obviously problematic from a HSE perspective. So you’d ideally, help the site get the paperwork done, and coach and explain that someone needs to be there with him, for example.

What does that mean?

Shouting isn’t going to work.

Wanting to problem solve, is going to work.

Being entirely anal and inflexible about ‘the rules’ isn’t going to work either. Finding a way to work safely and compliantly by using your brain is.