Trends and Conscientious in Workplace Health and Safety: Legal or Courtesy?

ABSTRACT
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the occupational health and safety additional
research into the human, operational, and regulatory issues on whether it is conducted
focusing on the legal requirement, or as a courtesy.
Design/methodology/approach This paper identifies several potential research opportunities
that can increase awareness of the importance of improving a firms workplace safety
practices. This paper will also contribute in helping us to see on how the occupational health
and safety is being taken for along with the issues in executing this legal requirement.
Findings This paper identifies 4 journals with the paper reports the review of the
Occupational Health and Safety Management in Organizations, mentioning on best
management practice or a more theoretical base from earlier research, workplace safety in the
supply chain focusing on its importance, the New Developments Concerning Managing
Human Factors for Safety on the factors of injuries and the remedies, also discussion and
debate amongst practitioners about the particular issues surrounding safety-related training.
Practical implications Giving out clear views are requirements on the total importance of
the workplace health and safety and how Human Resource should make it as a guideline.
Originality/value This paper contributes to the focus of the OHSseeing it from different
perspectives, understanding views on whether people are committing it on what senses
because the legal push or just a courtesy. It helps organization in understanding the value and
importance of taking OHS as something essential, fulfilling the requirements and protecting
the organizations.
Keywords Health & Safety, Trends, Conscientious, Legal, Safety, OHS (Occupational
Health & Safety), OHSA (Occupational, Health & Safety Administration)
Paper type Summary paper

INTRODUCTION
Touching on the OHS, in an organization, it is important to emphasize on the rules, steps, and
the details on the workplace safety requirement. The training on OSH can be seen as the
standard procedure in structuring an organization. It is in the law that every organization has
to fulfil this condition in order to get their practices certified and legal. The question is
whether they are applying it because it is what the law requires them to or they are seeing it
as a courtesy and human rights.
Why there are still organizations linger on implementing the OHS practiceswhat are
the issues and what is it thats contributing to this OHS problem in an organization. Also, how
do we reach the satisfactory results in complying with the OSHA. Early research by
psychologists and sociologists examined individual dispositions and social causes utilizing
disciplinary frameworks in developing concepts and theoretical insights into OHS. These
findings were further enhanced by the results of workplace surveys by industrial relations
specialists that drew attention to the importance of legislation and innovative non-regulatory
as well as regulatory strategies.
In the OHS, it does not only involve agreement on the papers, but it requires training
and information gathering to fully understand the function and how does the OHS works in
helping the organization to get the best outcome. Logistics and transportation firms have a
corporate social responsibility to follow sound workplace safety practices. The environmental
issues, diversity, and the human rights should be explored on how the important dimensions
of corporate social responsibility can contribute to the firm performance.
There is a tremendous amount of additional opportunities to conduct research on
workplace safety issues. It is important to understand how workplace safety incidents can
disrupt activities within the supply chain and identifying ways to mitigate them are very
necessary. In developing this argument, we commence with a review of studies in work
psychology, sociology and industrial relations.
In this journal, the discussion will be on the importance of safety at workplace,
factors that contribute to the increased importance of workplace safety, difficulties in
applying and evaluating safety performance, the role of the health and safety regulator,
whether to blame the victim or the system, regulatory factors (OSHA) and the human factors,
also the behaviour-based safety.
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The Human Resource Department will play a big role in applying and understanding
this specific function of theirsin taking charge of the workplace health and safety. It is
necessary for an organizations human resource department to understand the requirement of
applying the OSH, at least on its required standard and the effort in making the task
successful. However, some company are doing it by legal factorONLY and this lead them
to be taking this for granted, and this is where this summarization journal will come in handy.

CONTENT
The difficulties in applying the OSH according to the standard are understandable but
cant always be acceptable by the law as they are all questionable. There are a lot of factors
that leads the company to be thinking twice on taking the action, and making sure it is at its
best quality. One of the main factors is the cost of starting and maintaining the safety
requirements. In the introduction of the safety and health of an organization, it requires
training and evaluation on the training. This costs time and money to be spent. For the
simplest picture, just for a basic talk and information on safetythe company will have to
pay tons to the speaker in order to deliver the talk.
While on the maintenance on the safety equipment, lets take a building cleaning
company for instance. They are required to wear these safety guards all the time while doing
the cleaning, and the safety guards are needed to be recheck every week, getting the latest
equipment, make sure they are always updatedimagine how much time and cost an
organization has to spend in a single week, just to make sure their fire hose is working.
Another example is on the Workplace Violence Prevention Programme that on average
based on the basic program itinerary, will take at least 8 hours to be completed. This requires
a lot of time to be spent on the safety program itself. The company may have lost 8
productive hours for the thing that some company may look at as something that is not
crucial.
As firms operate their equipment in harsh environmental conditions, potential
accident is great. Therefore, the ability of the firm to keep its equipment in an acceptable state
of repair is a significant challenge. On-going costs such as maintenance, fleet administration,
and depreciation or lease costs represent just some of the major cost categories incurred
during the time that equipment is in the service of the operator.
The financial stability of a firm may have an effect on the workplace safety conditions
provided by logistics and transportation firms. In the increasingly competitive landscape of
the global economy, some firms may sacrifice the investment that they make into safety
practices for economic reasons. Research in the early post-supervision era brought to bear the
debate about financial stability and safety due to concerns that some firms may sacrifice
safety in substitution of short-term profits.

There are various ideas on evaluating and measuring safety performance. Accident
statistics may appear to be an ideal safety performance measure; however, measuring safety
performance is fraught with difficulties. It is well accepted that accident statistics alone are,
for a range of reasons, an unsatisfactory indicator of performance. First, organisational safety
performance is depending on many variables; and second, other safety interventions may be
taking place simultaneously
The fact that training features heavily in various registered OHS audit systems such
as the International Safety Rating Safety training evaluation, in general terms, is important
for number of reasons. Firstly, it indicates whether objectives have been met and whether
further training needs remain. It also provides feedback to the trainers about their
performance; it enables improvement to be made. It is a core part of the trainee's learning
cycle as it enables effectiveness of the investment of training to be appraised and it can be
used as a standard for comparing alternative interventions. The process of setting standards is
well recognised as a crucial part of managing safety and forms a major part of the ``Planning
and implementing'.' However, if performance standards and learning objectives are not
clearly identified at the outset it is not possible to assess the effectiveness of a training
intervention, safety or otherwise
The health and safety regulator plays an important role in the organizations health
and safety too. A rational approach to the application of health and safety legislation to safety
training has had to be adopted. The underlying rationale is that safety training requires that
trainees are exposed to a small risk during training in order to reduce an even greater risk
when on operational duties. The important aspect of this approach to risk decision making is
that there is a very broad interpretation of the benefits of training so as to include the benefits
to society as a balancing item to the risk exposure.
On the argument whether to blame the victim or the organizations safety system
the legacy of this social science research is captured in the tendency for psychological studies
to blame the victim; for sociological studies to blame the system and for management
studies to remain largely silent on these issues. There is an opportunity for management
research that is not limited by a narrow disciplinary focus but is able to provide a robust
conceptualization and more holistic framework in studying OHS management in context and
over time in organizational settings. Unsafe working conditions must be identified before
they result in an accident or injury. Employees need to be aware that they are responsible for
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reporting unsafe conditions and hazards. The primary goal is to prevent accidents from
occurring. However, if an accident or incident does occur, the manager must ensure it is
investigated to determine the underlying causes and to take corrective action. Afraid to be
blamed or be taken on regulatory action, a company promotes its safety precautions, and on
the other hand, believing in human rights or courtesy may be the reason on the
encouragement for the companys to be dealing with the OHS with its maximum capabilities
doing their best.
Obeying the regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration forms
the foundation of most organisations safety programmes. OSHA typically requires
companies to follow a hierarchy of methods of reducing safety hazards. First, employers must
install appropriate controls to protect workers. This may include proper ventilation, machine
guarding or other types of equipment that minimise hazards. Next, appropriate procedures
and policies must be implemented, and employees shall be fully trained on these procedures.
Finally, employers must provide whatever personal protective equipment is necessary for
employees to conduct their work safely. Personal protective equipment might include gloves,
safety glasses or goggles, face shields, smocks, work boots, respiratory protection, hard hats,
and so forth.
Today, most progressive companies do not rely merely on regulatory compliance as a
method of minimising on-the-job injuries. There is a growing significance of the regulatory
factors on workplace safety. They provide in monitoring and enforcing workplace safety rules
and regulations. The OSHA has a prominent role in ensuring employee safety and health in
USA and is being emulated in other countries as well. OSHA creates better working
environments by creating rules and regulations, and conducting inspections of many
workplace settings across several different types of industries. One of the primary
responsibilities for many firms is to ensure that these organizations are compliant with OSHA
rules and regulations.
The argument on whether the implementation of safety at work place is mainly
inspired by the legal advice or courtesy can be reviewable on the enforcement of the
Behaviour-Based Safety. All of the areas of discussion thus far have focused on accident
prevention: determining causes of previous accidents in hopes of taking the correct steps to
prevent a recurrence. Many organisations make use of some form of accident investigation to
accomplish this. These accident investigations often go no further than to identify human
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error as the cause of the accident. But they fail to identify underlying causes for these errors.
For example, it may be overly simplistic to conclude that an eye injury occurred because an
employee did not wear his/her protective eyewear. By looking deeper, however, an employer
may find that it was impossible to do the operation with glasses on or that no supervisor had
enforced the mandatory eyewear policy until an accident occurred.
Most safety programmes today reward employees for achieving the ultimate goal of
accident-free periods. This puts pressure on workers to report as few accidents as possible as
well as encouraging them to turn a blind eye to minor accidents and near misses. This also
results in the loss of excellent opportunities to determine underlying causes for the errors
which may cause accidents. The organization can prevent this negligence by giving rewards
on desirable behaviourwhen a worker reports a loss, they should be appreciated. The latest
method of maximising safety awareness in organisations is through the use of behaviourbased safety programmes.
Behaviour-based safety is an even more proactive approach to safety than the
traditional accident prevention methods. The underlying theme of this type of programme is
that employees are more likely to co-operate when you focus on rewarding their safe
behaviours rather than on punishing unsafe acts. Behaviour experts have long known that
rewarding desirable behaviour makes it occur more often. Behaviour-based safety is also
based on the learning cycle.
Typically, a person begins the learning cycle with an experience. As a person
continues to experience steady results from this type of experience, the person forms beliefs
about this experience. The person then comes to trust those beliefs and, thus, the behaviours
associated with that experience then become habit in accordance with their beliefs. As an
example, a person may speed on the freeway one day, and not get a speeding ticket or cause
an accident. They continue to speed on a daily basis and start to believe that this is a good
thing because there are no negative consequences, and they reach their destination quicker.
As this continues to be their experience, the speeding becomes a way of life, or habit.
Similarly, a worker may perform an unsafe practice one time because of convenience,
comfort, or as a means of completing a task quicker. When no negative consequences are
experienced, the worker may continue the unsafe practice and it will eventually become
habit. This type of behaviour obviously puts the worker at risk of incurring an injury.

Traditional safety programmes focus on targeting unsafe behaviours. The problem

with that is there are so many different ways to perform tasks unsafely that eliminating all of
them is virtually impossible. It is much simpler to focus on specific, safe behaviours that
workers need to perform in order to work safely. Then, the more people act safely, the less
they act unsafely because they cannot do both simultaneously. Behaviour-based safety begins
by naming desired safe behaviours, observing employees doing them, and then reinforcing
them.
There are various factors that contribute to the increasing importance of
Organizational Safety & Healthbut it is basically due to the working conditions. The
existence of poor working conditions has received considerable attention from academics,
government officials, consumers, and the press in recent years. Numerous efforts have been
initiated to curb workforce labour abuses as a way to ensure reasonable working conditions.
Unreasonable working conditions consists of too many hours worked, poor work schedules,
unacceptable compensation practices for overtime work, and deteriorating physical
workplace conditions. There can be shattering consequences if an employee is not provided
with reasonable working conditions. Indeed, in the motor carrier industry, some drivers are
provided with questionable work schedules and become pressured to work beyond acceptable
limits resulting in driver fatigue.
Given the importance of protecting worker rights, it is surprising that research linking
the activities of labour unions on safety performance has been scarce. An understanding of
the influence of unions on workers is fundamental to successful labour management on
workplace safety practices. Further research is needed to understand how unions and
management can work together to address the potential impact on both public policy and
workplace safety topics such as current issues that exist in the carrier industry.

CONCLUSIONS
Based on the contents in my write up, it is seen that there are many aspects that can be
associated with the compliance of an organization in implementing the Organizational Safety
& Health. The main question in this journal is that are they actually willing, or in a simpler
verbsincere, in performing OHS, regardless of the fact that it is an obligation by the law to
fulfil this. There are too many points which can make it something that some just had to deal
with or born from the sense of necessity in from their hearts.
From my first point, I mentioned on the difficulties in applying OHS in a company.
This shows how some company had to bear with the OSHAon regulatory base. In which, if
they were given a choice of not having to spend so much on the Health & Safety of workers
they wouldnt. That is why there are still some company, refusing in implementing this
duty. When the safety regulator comes to observer the company on their Safety efforts, they
might give out their best. Other days, they dont even give attention or precaution on the
workplace safety environment. This is the problem when an organization is too bold,
forgetting the power of the law, also the consequences that will harm them in case anything
ever happens. They overlooked on the human rights of each individuals and the common
courtesy.
The safety performance of an organization evaluation cant always be precise. This is
what causes the organization not to understand where they are lacking at. There is no single
measure of safety performance that is unmistakable and wholly resistant to abuse. This leads
to conclude that other measures are required to measure the full spectrum of safety
performance. Nevertheless, safety training effectiveness is one accepted safety performance
indicator. How can an organization reach the desired standard of OSH, with no guideline or
clear objectives? They may have the common courtesywilling to give out the best,
appreciate evaluations and have the understanding on how important it is to take upkeep of
the OSH, butdo they know how far they need to plan? What do they need to prepare? If the
evaluating system cant reach the standard it should be, then how can a companys OSH
development can actually, improve?
In a short conclusion, there are factors that contribute to the desire on carrying it
(OSH) out on a voluntary basis, and some of the difficulties can add to the feeling of being
compelled in implementing it. Anyhow, no matter how you look at itcourtesy or by law, the
OHS will always be vital.
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RECOMMENDATIONS
The OSH, by law is of course compulsory to be followed. But, awareness on the importance
of OSH itself must be well accepted. In order to achieve the required standard, an
organization needs to come under Law and Courtesy awareness. Why do I say this? Because
doing things unwillingly results in implementing it half-heartedlynot taking it seriously
that even it is being done, it will not achieve the required degree. On the other hand, not
understanding the law well can also be a problem as it contributes to unsatisfactory work
results. That is why legal factor should also be looked on seriously TOGETHER with having
the common courtesy. Common courtesy needs to be understood individually, especially the
Human Resource Manager who is in charge of the safety and health of the workers. It is in
their work scope and instead of just understanding the law, empathy is something that should
be inculcated in the HR managers. The economic stability of a company should include the
OSHnot on profit base only. After all, the loss they may have to face in case of accidents
could be greater than the amount they have to spend in providing safety and a healthy
environment at the workplace.
The general precaution may include a continuous inspection to prevent accidents and
support workplace safety. Workplaces will be inspected regularly to identify and correct
unsafe conditions or practices. All managers should ensure that their employees receive an
orientation on the organizations occupational safety and health program and workplace
specific safe work practices. Education and training will be provided to ensure that
employees know the working procedures for doing their job safely. On-going safety training
will be provided as new programs, procedures, and equipment are introduced to the
workplace.
The evaluation on the OSH of a company should be taken seriously. The invigilator
should look upon the application in detail instead of sealing their senses with the point of just
to get the work done. The company will improve based on the evaluation results. They might
think they have done the best, but there could be another large hole they fail to notice. The
HR department basically in the Safety department must create a safety & health management
system, or safety program that can help in focusing the organizations efforts in improving the
work environment For instance, if you manage a small business in a low-risk industry, your
system may simply involve listening to your employees' concerns and responding to them. A

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large business in a hazardous industry may have notebooks full of written policies and
procedures and a full-time safety director
REFERENCES
www.emeraldinsight.com
-

Journal of European Industrial Training

o Safety training a special case?
By Mark Cooper David Cotton
The International Journal of Logistics Management
o Workplace safety in the supply chain: a review of the literature and call for
research
By David E. Cantor
Management Research News
o New developments concerning managing human factors for safety
By Phyllis A. Ayers Brian H. Kleiner

www.reasearchonline.com
-

Occupational health and safety management in organizations

o A review
By Michael Zanko & Patrick Dawson
University of Wollongong, patrickd@uow.edu.au

www.ehstoday.com
-

The Top 10 Ways to Improve Safety Management

www.myhr.com
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Occupational Safety and Health (Human Resources Policy 4)

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