Occupational safety is important for many reasons. First and foremost, an employee should never compromise their health and bodily safety to complete a job. Instead, employers have both the legal and moral obligation to provide a workplace that is free from known dangers. To achieve this, employers need to develop a safety strategy that fits their facility.
The management of all activities and events inside any industry to protect its personnel and assets by avoiding risks, hazards, accidents and near misses is known as industrial safety. Safety is paramount; a safe and healthy workplace not only protects workers from injury and illness, it can also lower injury/illness costs, reduce absenteeism and turnover, increase productivity and quality, and raise employee morale. In other words, safety is good for business.
An SMS should be thoroughly ingrained in a company’s culture and sustained over time. The number one priority of businesses today should be safety – and in the safest companies in the world, this is espoused as a key value. Safety performance affects productivity, insurance, competition for work and social standing. The safest companies in the world provide a safe system of work and train their people how to work safely within that environment. They train specifically about workplace hazards and continue to monitor competency and knowledge about the best way to control workplace hazards as part of the rules for workplace safety.