Work-related injuries, illnesses and deaths are costly to everyone.
Making a safe, healthy and accident-free and disease-free workplace is important. It will contribute to increasing the level of work environment which is one of the important components to the quality of work life and productivity of the organization.
The workplace environment has a direct impact on employee health. Stress, harassment, workplace violence, smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, poor eating choices, and poor ergonomic design all contribute to illness and absenteeism among the workforce.
The study by Klitzman and Stellman (1989) showed that poor working environment, for example noise, polluted air, non-ergonomic workspace conditions and lack of privacy indicate a significant correlation to employee job satisfaction. These factors will influence the behaviour of employees to work.
The International Labor Organization (ILO, 2009) estimated that, globally, every 15 seconds, 153 workers have a work-related accident and 317 million accidents occur on the job annually; many of these resulting in extended absences from work.
The ILO estimates shows that some 2.3 million women and men around the world succumb to work-related accidents or diseases every year; this corresponds to over 6, 000 deaths every single day.
Worldwide, there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually.
Occupational safety and health at work are vital components of decent work. The physical conditions and mental demands of the workplace determine to a great extent workers’ condition.
Occupational accidents have a significant human, social and economic cost, which we should strive to eliminate by ensuring that all workplaces are safe.
Since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986, corporate safety culture has become the focus of, and has been implicated in accident causation by, many large-scale industrial accident investigations.
The role of occupational safety and health (OSH) practitioners or advisers, and their contribution to OSH, is also clear and accepted.
Good safety culture must be put in place in our working place in order to minimize the occurrence of accident and hazard at work and to improve safety performance.
Assessing the relationships between corporate safety culture, competent advice and safety performance will advance understanding of what makes a safe workplace.
This will inform the development of policies and practices for helping organisations to work more safely.
