Health and safety responsibilities will need to be assigned to line managers and expertise must be available, either inside or outside the enterprise. The purpose of the health and safety organization is to harness the collective enthusiasm, skills and effort of the entire workforce with managers taking key responsibility and providing clear direction. The prevention of accidents and ill‐health through management systems of control becomes the focus rather than looking for individuals to blame after the incident occurs. 

The control arrangements should be part of the written health and safety policy. Performance standards will need to be agreed upon and objectives set which link the outputs required to specific tasks and activities for which individuals are responsible. For example, the objective could be to carry out a workplace inspection once a week to an agreed checklist and rectify faults within three working days. The periodic, say annual, audit would check to see if this was being achieved, and if not, investigate the reasons for non‐compliance with the objective. People should be held accountable for achieving the agreed objectives through existing or normal procedures such as: 

• Job descriptions, which include health and safety responsibilities; performance appraisal systems, which look at individual contributions. 
• Arrangements for dealing with poor performance; where justified, the use of disciplinary procedures. 

Such arrangements are only effective if health and safety issues achieve the same degree of importance as other key management concerns and a good performance should be considered as an essential part of career and personal development.