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The tool is administered via an online survey by employers to their management, supervisors, and workers, as shared by Senior Minister of State for Manpower Zaqy Mohamad.
As part of efforts to help companies in Singapore inculcate a strong sense of workplace safety and health (WSH) ownership among employees, Senior Minister of State for Manpower Zaqy Mohamad has introduced iOwnWSH — a free online company-administered assessment tool for companies to understand their level of WSH and get recommendations for improvement.
The iOwnWSH tool is administered via an online survey by employers to their management, supervisors, and workers, and is available in English, Chinese, Tamil, and Bengali.
Through a customised company report generated from the iOwnWSH assessment, companies can then identify the areas that require improvement, for example, low sense of psychological safety in their workers due to a blame culture. This will, in turn, help them put in place appropriate interventions to improve WSH ownership in the organisation, SMS Zaqy said.
More information on how to use the iOwnWSH tool can be found on the WSH Council’s website.
As shared by SMS Zaqy, the tool was developed based on a multi-year study by the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) WSH Institute and the Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, to understand how individual, cultural, and organisational factors can affect organisational WSH ownership in Singapore.
Singapore's WSH2028 target
The iOwnWSH tool was launched at a recent Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) awards ceremony.
Speaking at the ceremony, SMS Zaqy shared: "The first eight months of 2022 were challenging, with an annualised fatality rate of 1.5 per 100,000 workers. But in the later months of 2022, when the Heightened Safety Period (or HSP) kicked in, it gave us confidence that incident prevention is attainable, with an annualised fatality rate of 0.8 per 100,000 – close to half what it was pre-HSP."
He emphasised it is thus crucial to remain vigilant in WSH so that workers can stay safe and so Singapore remains on track towards its WSH2028 target. For context, as shared by MOM and the WSH Council previously, in 2017, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced a target to reduce and sustain the country's workplace fatality rate to less than 1.0 per 100,000 workers by 2028, in line with that for the safest countries in the world.
The annualised fatality rate per 100,000 workers in H1 2023 stands at about 0.8 — what SMS Zaqy noted was better than the WSH2028 target of below 1.0 per 100,000 workers. According to him, this is an achievement only five OECD countries have attained on a consistent basis.
"Notwithstanding this, our preliminary investigations into recent fatalities showed that they occurred as a result of inadequate control measures and negligence. I am concerned that companies may be becoming complacent again."
While Singapore has exited from the HSP, the Multi-Agency Workplace Safety Taskforce (MAST) has kept most of the HSP measures as permanent safeguards, and introduced new safety accountability, focus and empowerment, or SAFE, measures to strengthen WSH ownership at all levels.
Work on MAST’s SAFE measures is underway, but companies can expect the following developments:
- Per MAST's earlier announcement, from June 2024, all construction sites with a project value equal to or above S$5mn are required to have a video surveillance system monitoring, for high-risk work activities. A public consultation is currently underway on a draft guide detailing the coverage of high-risk work activities, suitable mounting locations, and specifications, as well as operational considerations to take note of.
- CEO or board directors of companies in the higher-risk construction, manufacturing, transport & storage, and marine sectors are required to attend a half-day Top Executive WSH Programme by March 2024. This programme, currently available in-person, in the English language, will be rolled out in Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. There will also be a new e-learning version to be launched in September 2023.
At the worker level, SMS Zaqy encourages continuous WSH training. To enable this, online micro-learning for construction work permit holders will be available in 11 different languages as well.
Lead image / Senior Minister of State for Manpower Zaqy Mohamad Facebook
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