Safety Culture

This article emphasized on the method to change the safety cultures in theory and practice at the work place level and also the role played by the prevention culture to deal with the emerging work related health issues. According to ACSNI Human Factor Study Group, safety culture is defined as the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to organization’s health and safety management system. As described by International Atomic Energy Agency, there are 5 characteristics of positive safety culture which consist of leadership, communication, decentralized decision making, learning and safety prioritize (Kim et al., 2016d). Leadership is the commitment by

Thirdly, the decision making and accountability should be decentralized for creating and maintain good safety culture. Fourth, all employees should contribute the ideas on how to improve the safety especially the one working in the frontline as they are exposed to great risk that endanger their live. Finally, safety should be treated as top priority that must be integrated into every aspect of the company.

Implementation of safety culture require timeless effort as the late political leader Mao Tse Tung said, “People’s attitudes and opinions have been formed over decades and it is not possible to change by attending few meeting or lectures”. Kurt Lewin has developed model of change called unfreeze-change-referee model which is further developed by Professor Edgar Schein, a management consultant and organization psychologist. In his theory, for change to occur, the changes need to go through 3 steps of unfreezing-changing-refreezing stages in order to reach an improved new system that then becomes stabilized (Kim et al., 2016e). That means the present state need to be destabilized to discard the old behavior before the new behavior can be adopted. There will be 3

OHSAS is complicated as she said; there is much compliance to manage in order to meet the requirement set. Endress+Hauser Malaysia have over 80 employees and they all come from different culture and education background. It is not easy task to change the safety culture in a company as people are used to their past behavior and work convenient. Implementation of the positive safety culture is revolutionary which require much longer time and effort to change. The company OHSAS committees have organized various training, presentation and activities that involve all the employees to participate so that they are well informed and aware of the progress in implementing the safety and health policy. There are safety and health seminar, first aid training, fire-fighting training, safety sharing moments, unsafe act and condition report and so on. Top management also committed and slot in time for participant to share safety and health issue in the daily report