I think safety departments are best equipped when they are not siloed into their own thing. Safety needs to be a value for the organization and sharing the service is one way to do that. Safety is closely tied with environmental, industrial hygiene, and even facilities and maintenance activities. It is important to note that putting additional responsibilities onto the safety department is not always beneficial, e.g. HR responsibilities. Unfortunately, a lot of small companies try to cut costs and safety is often first.

IH and Safety seem like a logical pairing, but i think that's different than other pairings. Ultimately i think the choice really depends on the size of the company and the activities that are completed at the site. It's a span of control decision.

I wish safety and environmental were separate. There’s so many regulations for each and I feel like we need to focus on either safety on environmental. However, this isn’t the real world!

We always get paired with security or Emergency Management too. Safety is so rarely actually taken seriously until it has to be taken seriously!

I have never understood 100% the connection with HR.