

According to International Labor Organization (ILO), Occupational accidents or work-related diseases result in over 2.78 million deaths per year globally and that’s only part of the story. These Occupational Injuries/Illnesses also result in over 374 million non-fatal work-related injuries each year, resulting in more than 4 days of absences from work. The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is a staggering $3 trillion.
These numbers are absolutely staggering and scary considering decades of hard work done to
While situation is not the same as 20th century from safety perspective due to improvements in awareness, programs and technology but we can easily infer that we are still missing something from the secret sauce of “safety culture” at global, local and organizational levels.
Since 1950, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have shared a common definition of occupational health:
“The main focus in occupational health is on three different objectives:
All international, governmental organizations, private companies, employees & EHSEM software companies try to follow a similar mantra that Occupational Health & Safety and Employee Wellbeing is an integral part of their work culture. The truth is that OHS/EHSEM is still treated as a standalone process and as a step child in most organizations. The responsibilities, reporting, delegation of tasks, investigations and analysis of workplace injuries/illnesses is not integrated with any other process and/or system. This is where the problem exists i.e. you cannot have a working culture of safety by treating it as a silo unrelated to the core of the business.
According to Merriam-Webster, the word “culture” is defined as “the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time”. e.g. Christmas celebrations are an essential culture in western countries because it brings everyone together as a single entity. If each person celebrated Christmas in a silo at their homes without sharing the happiness with others it wouldn’t feel like a true Christmas culture. If your most favourite sports team won the biggest sports event, it wouldn’t feel like a culture if the whole city isn’t out in celebrations. It’s the shared cohesion and togetherness that creates the culture.
Now the issue with extremely high death and injury/illness rates globally is that OHS/EHSEM is still not part of the culture. It’s a silo’ed process and tasks. This silo is created because most organizations are running on technologies that provide only 1st level of the workplace safety.
Level 1 (Data Level Integration): Ability for safety and health softwares to capture safety related data/information in simple forms with a standalone database underneath. These systems do not integrate with any other process, departments, hierarchies, internal/external entities and stakeholder. The good part is that you can capture your injuries/illness data and get reports from the system but the bad part is that safety process doesn’t seamlessly integrate with anything else as it should with other processes of HR, Finance, Sales and Procurement etc. This doesn’t allow for a collective learning and improvement of safety and health at a department, plant, organization, city, state, country or global level.
Level 2 (Process Level Integration): Achieving this should be the goal of all organizations who really want to make safety part of their culture. At this level, Occupational Safety and Health is a fully integrated process just like any other process in the organization. All employees, managers, departments, internal/external stakeholders and systems work collectively towards addressing, investigating, management, tracking and preventative learning e.g.
This means that OHS/EHSEM has become integrated into every single facet of the organization at process level. Sodales’s EHSEM software is what allows companies to achieve Level 2 and assists them to achieve the real “workplace safety culture.
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