Balancing Priorities as a Safety Manager: Strategies to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

As a safety manager, you play a lot of different roles. Every day, you’re a detective, problem solver, mentor, policy enforcer and more.

Over my 42-year career, I spent much of my time strapped to a pager or some kind of electronic leash, always wondering did someone get hurt? That constant alertness is part of the job but can easily lead to burnout.

Balancing these responsibilities with your job needs a good plan. To help you, I’m sharing seven ways you can manage stress, prioritize tasks and find balance in your role.

Table of Contents

• The Reality of Competing Priorities
• Why Stress is Misunderstood
• Framework for Prioritization
• Strategies to Prevent Burnout
• Lighten the Load with Technology
• The Key to Sustained Safety Leadership

The Reality of Competing Priorities

The role of a safety manager is demanding, requiring you to balance multiple responsibilities with often conflicting priorities. Here are some common challenges you may face:

Urgent Response vs. Planned Preventative Activities

Your day likely swings between reactive tasks, like addressing incidents, and proactive efforts, such as conducting training or hazard assessments. The problem is that urgent issues often overshadow preventative measures, leaving little time to on the future.

Administrative Tasks vs. Field Presence

While documentation is crucial, I’ve experienced how it can pull you away from being on-site—where the real safety culture is built, and where you can gain valuable insights.

It’s disheartening to feel like you’re moving further away from the work that brought you into the field in the first place.

Company-Wide vs. Site-Specific Needs

Balancing your organization’s safety goals with the unique needs of individual sites can create tension, especially when site-specific priorities conflict with broader company objectives, like budget constraints delaying important safety investments.

Sometimes, I felt out of sync with my organization. I knew what needed to be done, but budget constraints or other corporate goals delayed critical safety measures. Balancing organizational safety goals with the unique needs of individual sites often created tension.

Engaging Employees vs. Being a “Safety Cop”

Finding the balance between enforcing safety protocols and maintaining employee trust is tricky. Focusing too much on enforcement can breed resentment, while focusing too much on engagement may lead to overlooked safety measures.

Deviations in behavior aren’t about being mischievous or belligerent. They simply make sense to the person in the moment. Convincing someone to act on something they’re not fully bought into takes significant effort, and over time, that struggle can lead to burnout.

High Workloads and Time Pressure

With a growing list of responsibilities—compliance audits, inspections, training programs, and risk assessments—you often face overwhelming workloads and time pressure, making it hard to prioritize effectively.

Stress Isn’t the Enemy—Poor Stress Mismanagement Is

Stress is a natural way our bodies help us deal with challenges. In the workplace, it can keep you alert, motivate you to meet deadlines or avoid danger. When handled well, stress can help us focus, take action and boost productivity.

Safety professionals are empathetic and caring by nature. But that empathy, coupled with limited support from leadership and the pressure to meet numbers, creates a perfect storm for burnout.

The problem arises when stress is left unmanaged. Too much stress is often the root cause of burnout. Burnout doesn’t happen overnight. It develops over time when stress becomes chronic and poorly addressed. For example, trying to balance office work and being in the field can be exhausting if tasks are not shared or prioritized correctly.

Poorly managing stress contributes to burnout in different ways. Not setting priorities or boundaries can lead to feeling like every task is urgent. This constant pressure can prevent recovery and make it hard to focus or make good decisions. High workloads, along with frequent interruptions or unclear tasks, can make the situation worse, causing less productivity and feelings of helplessness.

For safety managers, the emotional side of the job can increase burnout effects. Handling workplace accidents, injuries or upset employees is emotionally draining, and without the right support or training, it can harm mental health. When stress is not handled properly, safety professionals may become disconnected, cynical, or doubt their ability to do their jobs well.

Frameworks for Prioritization

Managing competing priorities is no small feat, but tools and frameworks can help you work smarter:

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix sorts tasks into four categories:

• Urgent and Important: Tasks requiring immediate attention. For example, addressing a major safety incident or resolving a critical compliance issue.
• Important but Not Urgent: Tasks that are vital but can be scheduled, such as developing a comprehensive safety training program or updating policies.
• Urgent but Not Important: Tasks that you can delegate, such as routine administrative work or follow-ups on low-risk maintenance issues.
• Neither Urgent nor Important: Tasks that add little value and you should eliminate.

The Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. This principle is particularly effective for prioritizing efforts in safety initiatives where impact varies.

Here’s an example of how you can do this: Instead of spreading resources evenly across all hazards, focus on the activities that are responsible for the most workplace incidents. For instance, if slip-and-fall accidents make up the majority of reported injuries, prioritize initiatives such as improving floor maintenance, adding anti-slip mats, and training employees on safe walking practices.

By concentrating on the most significant risks, you can achieve a greater impact on overall safety performance.

These frameworks can help manage stress by creating structure and reducing the feeling of being overwhelmed. When safety managers know which tasks to tackle, which to delegate and which to defer or eliminate, they can work with greater confidence and efficiency.

Strategies to Prevent Burnout

When managing stress, it’s important to consider how you spend your time at work and in your personal life.

Here are actionable steps to regain control and maintain balance in this demanding role:

• Delegate and collaborate: Build a team you trust and empower them to take ownership of specific tasks.
• Take care of yourself: Make time for activities you enjoy. This could be going to the gym, doing a favorite hobby or taking 5 minutes during your workday to close your eyes and breathe slowly. If you can’t find 5 minutes, try setting a timer for just one minute. You will notice a difference.
• Optimize processes: Use technology to automate time-consuming tasks.
• Set realistic expectations: Focus on what’s achievable and align your goals with leadership priorities.

Lighten the Load with Technology

Safety managers need to use more technology. It reduces paperwork and manual tasks, improves safety culture and helps to connect with younger generations.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen is that while leadership genuinely cares about worker health and safety, their focus often stops at traditional metrics like TRIR and other lagging indicators.

A platform like Intelex changes how company leaders think about safety by focusing on important indicators. With easy-to-use dashboards, leaders can see data from things like observations, inspections, incidents and training hours. This gives them a quick and clear picture of safety performance. It shows that tracking proactive indicators is much more valuable than just looking at past data.

Key Intelex Technologies Include:

• Health and safety software: Automate compliance tracking, inspections and reporting to eliminate manual tasks, reduce errors and ensure compliance deadlines are met.
• Mobile apps: Improve real-time communication between field workers and managers for faster incident reporting, efficient task delegation and better visibility into field operations.
• Data dashboards: Consolidate key safety metrics for quick, actionable insights.

For more on how EHS management software can streamline your responsibilities, check out our guide: Convince Your Boss to Invest in EHS Management Software

The Key to Sustained Safety Leadership

As a safety manager, your ability to protect others starts with protecting yourself.

Prioritizing effectively, managing stress and taking deliberate steps to prevent burnout isn’t just about personal well-being. It’s essential for sustaining the critical work you do.

Moments of recognition helped reignite my passion for the field, even during challenging times. I remember a huge guy approached me at a festival and said, ‘I like all that safety crap you’re doing. Keep it up—you’re keeping us safe.’ Moments like that remind you why this work matters.

Remember: Small, consistent changes can have a big impact. By using tools and strategies to lower stress and build resilience, you can keep balance and make a positive impact on workplace safety.

Ready to see how health and safety software can help you manage work stress? Create your own Intelex custom demo.