Introduction
Safety and health measures have to be followed to uphold government rules. These regulations are for the progress of humanity since they are comprised of basic safety and health precautions. These provisions are intended to curb the public from any unfortunate occurrences.
One of the critical matters of any company and productivity should be to safeguard the security and safety of employees. Work settings that offer workers all the aids in conjunction with pay but fail to provide a protected and healthier setting may undergo significant losses.
Hazards and risks concerning the place of work’s safety and health impacts organizations greatly. The company’s losses and costs may be in terms of the workers’ health, which then results in an elevated amount of employee absence. An organizational loss might also result from employee dissatisfaction, which might be a foundation for low worker turnover in the future. As a result, organizations are presently focused more on designing and drafting operative rules and guidelines to safeguard safe environments. This paper aims to evaluate the safety and health of Organizations. It specifically concentrates on the essentiality of implementing policies for worker’s safety and health.
Literature Review
Safety and health at the place of work mean protection of the safety, welfare, and health of the individuals who are involved in work employment. The reason is to offer a safe atmosphere for workers while working. In the UK, the ‘work and safety Act of 1974′ is regarded as a vital part of the legislation. It protects work-related safety and health in the UK. Work-related health and safety protect the workers and the co-workers’ relatives and others who may be impacted as a result of the workplace setting. Work-related health and safety are also crucial in other aspects of financial, legal, and moral reasons.
All firms are responsible for ensuring a safe work setting for their workers and others who may be impacted. Worker’s lives and health are regarded as moral responsibilities. Regular exercise of work-related health and safety comprises of preventative, compensatory, and punitive impacts of the law. These regulations safeguard the health and safety of the employees. Work-related health and safety also intend to minimize the degree of worker’s injury and other aspects linked to illness. This involves disability benefit costs, medical care, and sick leave. It also involves dealings amongst ‘subject areas’ like industrial engineering, work-related health psychology, ergonomics, and work-related medicine, and safety engineering, work-related hygiene, and industrial and chemical engineering.
In most companies, physical hazards are a common injury source. These injuries are unavoidable in some companies like in construction and mining. With time, organizations are evolving safety procedures and methods to regulate physical danger at the place of work. Exceptional glitches might happen in situations of employment of children. The most common physical threat is falling. Falls mainly happen in industries that deal with maintenance and cleaning, construction, transportation, and healthcare industries. Falls are a principal injury cause in individuals aged 65 years and above and are a top cause of accidental death in individuals aged 85 years and above. Falls are a ‘multifactorial problem,’ and there lacks an avoidance measure to stop all falls.
The company should offer all the required equipment. The equipment comprises of cloths for a shield against the weather. ‘These cloths must be worn by workers at the place of clothes to reduce risk to their safety and health. Employers must offer footwear and eye and face protection to the workers for safety in the fabrication and welding industry. Most mechanical and physical threats occur while operating machinery. It is common in manufacturing, agricultural, construction, and mining industries and highly risky for employees. Most machines are unsafe due to their hot surfaces, moving parts, and sharp edges. If the machines are operated carelessly, they could crash, burn, tear, and result in many wounds and significant injuries to employees.
The British safety and health law’s foundation is the ‘safety and health at work Act of 1974.’ The policy set forth the overall responsibilities that organizations have towards workers and the public and their obligations to themselves and others. The ‘Health and Safety Executive’ (HSE) recognized in 1974 is an inspective body that controls the safety and health under the health and safety commission interdepartmental organization. HSE’s mission is ‘to safeguard that risks to safety and health of the population commencing from work events are appropriately regulated by establishing standards and developing inspection and benchmarks of working conditions.’
The culture of organizational safety has been regarded as a contributing aspect to many injuries in ‘industrial accident.’ It is presently widely recognized that firms with a robust ‘safety culture’ are more operative in averting injuries and accidents at work. ‘Occupational safety and health’ (OSH) advisors are a crucial part of an operative system of risk management, in addition to playing an essential role in promoting safety and health in the workplace.
Avoidance of work-associated injuries and illnesses is significant for workers, industry, and society in general. The culture of corporate security, which reflects the shared values of organizations that influence its members’ values, beliefs, and attitudes concerning security, is now acknowledged as powerful guidance on injuries and accidents at the workplace. ‘Occupational safety and health’ (OSH) specialists also play an essential role in enhancing safety and health in the workplace. Still, less is understood regarding their particular contribution to safety enactment.
The culture of safety imitates the attitude, perceptions, values, and beliefs employees have regarding safety. The security culture is usually viewed as a subdivision of business culture, and the differences between these theories and the security climate are unclear. The culture of safety is a ‘multidimensional perception.’ The number of organizational aspects ranges from 2-19′ but nearly all the time consists of factors like job satisfaction, communication and leadership style, management responsibility, risk-taking, and risk awareness. Generally, leadership is essential for the culture of safety. The security culture in a firm is said to be impacted by two crucial factors; the system of management and leadership and the kind of work carried out. Commitment by management is a critical aspect of organizational security management.
The safety management system and safety culture are backed by the operative, comprehensive training and education. Organizational culture influences workers’ habits, behaviors, and norms as they complete their daily tasks and assignments. For a robust culture of safety, a firm must have established tough prominence on the production values of safety management systems. The culture should devise intensely entrenched views in the values of constant training and education of its workers. An operative culture of safety is an outcome of a learning company. As linked threats and hazards are recognized, the capability to utilize the info becomes the key to the organization, and the execution of the essential controls. Training and education aim to transform or enhance worker performance or amend conduct.
Early literature submitted that companies with good records of safety performance hired safety officers in top ranking spots. In recent times, the existence of a ‘safety manager’ has been recognized to impact safety climate. From October 2009, the ‘Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) stated that the overall United States workforce was nearly ‘154 million,’ and all of them were hypothetically vulnerable to accidents in the workplace. Even with strict work-related health and safety management regulations involving nearly all establishments, and notwithstanding every individual commitment of the employer to safety, work-related injuries and deaths happen at distressing rates.
However, some researches have concentrated on the direct impact of various kinds of leadership on safety culture. Catastrophically, in 2008 there existed ‘3.7 million’ non-lethal accidents among all employers in the private industry. Beyond 50 percent of the ‘3.7 million’ injuries were fatal and involved days away from work or job transfers. In 2007, the United States’ manufacturing industry had ‘14,071 million’ workers of which recorded 5.6 totals incidences of illnesses and injuries per 100 workers.
With developments in industrial technology comprising robotics and bearing in mind decades-long of OSHA (in Malaysia) enforcement and requirements, the manufacturing sector continues to record inadmissibly high injury rates. This results in the query of whether, in the hunt for enhancing productivity, firms pay attention to the health and safety of their workers. Because manufacturing is one of the key contributors to significant economies, the sector’s progression must correspond to the compliance and awareness of the sector concerning health and safety. From the figures, it might be deduced that work-related safety is yet to be assimilated as a culture in many industries. Mostly in the manufacturing sector.
Nonconformity of the organization’s policies to those of the safety regulation establishments that ensure safety culture might result in a lack of safety cultures in industries. All companies and self-employed individuals with more than five workers should establish a written health and safety policy. It is crucial to recognize that nonconformity of these policies might involuntarily add to privation of safety culture because safety provisions capture the presence of an inscribed statement imitating the firm’s obligation to safety. Some employers fail to ensure safety by regarding work related health and safety policies as unimportant. Therefore, nonconformity to policies could result in inoperative safety culture.
OSHA requires companies with more than 40 workers to institute a workplace safety committee. For firms with more than 40 workers, the safety board includes two representatives, each from workers and the employer, while in firms of more than 100 workers, there are four representatives from both the workers and the employer. The ‘safety committee’ roles are mostly to make commendations to develop and promote procedures to safeguard workplace health and safety and to observe the efficiency of such actions. However, despite the significance of the workers’ participation in safety, most of the health and safety committees were designed without goals. Finally, they are divided into void discussion sittings with no outcomes.
Firms surpassing 100 to 500 workers, depending on business nature, must assign a health and safety officer where this policy’s nonconformity might result in a lack of safety culture. Health and safety officers should not be strictly limited concerning the number of employees. This is because danger lies in the kind of work being practiced in work and not in numbers. Because this is a policy that guarantees conformity with the health and safety policies of different Acts is observed, the obligation should not be restrained to specific groups of professions only.