“Maintaining work safety should not take a day off because danger never knows leave” (Anonymous).

The statement above indicates that every employee must always maintain safety at work because various hazards that pose a risk of accidents can occur at any time. Work accidents can be caused by both human error and other factors. The accident can cause injury and fatalities to employees. Therefore, the workplace safety culture must always be applied by every employee to reduce the risk of workplace accidents.

However, in fact, according to the Ministry of Manpower of Singapore, there were 28 workplace fatalities in the first half of 2022. This number is higher than the second half year of 2021 cases. Half of those 28 national workplace fatalities were because of falls from height and vehicular-related incidents. Besides, workplace injuries still happened although it is 4.5% lower than in the second half of the previous year.

Then, what does workplace accident mean and what is the solution to minimize it?

Definition of Work Accident

Workplace accidents are incidents that cause a person to experience physical injury to fatalities during work, both at the workplace and on the way to work. This accident can be caused by technical and non-technical factors.

Technical factors include workplaces that do not apply safety aspects such as lighting and cleanliness, proper condition of equipment especially in construction companies, and transportation that is not properly maintained or carries excessive loads. While non-technical factors consist of the lack of ability and skills of the workforce and workers who work without wearing safety equipment.

An example of a work accident, for example, was reported by The Strait Times in November 2022 when a 69-year-old Singaporean fell from a height when he was carrying out cleaning services at a vacated unit in the Hilltops condominium at Cairnhill Circle. Besides, in July 2022, a construction worker suffered fatal injuries while standing on the rear counterweight of a forklift to tie an electric cable. Another workplace accident happened on December 27, 2022, as reported by M Today Singapore when a 31-year-old worker passed away after being pinned by a machine. It happened at 7.53 am at 601 Rifle Range Road, near the start of a popular walking trail leading to the MacRitchie Reservoir Park. MOM stated that it is the 45th fatality in 2022.

Company Losses If a Work Accident Occurs

Workplace accidents that occur will certainly be very detrimental. It is not only detrimental to employees due to injuries but also to the company. Work accidents make the company’s image worse. In addition, it will also reduce customers’ and employees’ trust in the company. Employees and customers are important assets for the company so losing their trust will cause a fatal impact on achieving work targets and business profits.

The Singapore government has regulated the workplace safety and health act (WSHA) in statutes that explain company liabilities and penalties such as incident reporting and compensation. The company will be subject to a maximum fine of $50.000 and or 12 months imprisonment. It is based on the offenses.

Solutions for Reducing Work Accident Rates

The way to reduce the rate of work accidents is to ask workers or employees to comply with existing standard operating procedures and equip themselves with personal protective equipment. But this must be conveyed in a structured, detailed, and repetitive manner so that employees can refresh the material that has been delivered. So the most effective solution is to organize WSHA culture training.

Workplace accidents can be drastically reduced by requiring workers to learn safety procedures regularly, for example, every 6 months. It meets MOM and Singapore government requirements for all companies. However, the different working hours and activities of each employee make it difficult to determine the right schedule for holding training. As a solution, companies can conduct online training.

WSHA online training will be very effective to be held via online learning applications or software namely LMS. This is because training materials can be delivered in a structured and attractive format. In addition, employees can also access materials anytime and anywhere according to their time and schedule. LMS will also be a cost-effective solution.

To achieve this training objective, employees are required to review safety procedures every 6 months. So that the material is easier to remember and always applied in every work implementation. By using the LMS, companies don’t have to bother re-organizing training because the material in the previous LMS can still be accessed. Companies only need to prepare a question bank as an assessment to measure each achievement.

Creating learning content for LMS is simple. The format can be video, animation, text, SCORM, etc. It can also be made only with the help of a camera from a cell phone and made by an internal team.

Companies can use cloud-based LMS so they don’t need to invest in servers and their own IT team to implement online learning lessons. For that, we recommend Katalis.App to make things easier for companies.

Katalis.App is a cloud-based LMS that can be accessed with a mobile app. This will make it easier for employees to do workplace safety learning anywhere and anytime. With the analytics feature from Katalis.App, management can monitor the progress of employee learning processes, and employee compliance with compliance. For other convenience benefits from Katalis.App., contact us here.