Asia Pacific Environmental and Occupational Health Journal

Objective: The aim of this paper is to strike towards reaching goals for good OSH leadership and commitment onworkplace design and working conditions. The current issues are to obtain commitment from top management to changethe mindset on the importance of design changes to improve safety performance at work and develop leadership towards commitment at workplace. Several meetings and engagements were held by the engineering, and SHE team to convincethe top management to provide proposals and the investment for safety and health. Method: Methodology for datacollection is based on workplace design involving direct input from top management and supported by observation and checklist. The data collection had been collected since a year ago involving top management and workers observation. The analysis focuses on frequency and profiling to foresee the challenges and way-forward. Findings: Based on observation, the commitment shown by the top management related to workplace design changes has given high priority to improving safety and health conditions at work. The top management leads the brainstorming session for the improvision and implementation of the program and planning. The details budgeting had been approved and assigned to the engineering design team for implementation. To ensure the successfulness of the project, the top management hadensured that the selected team did report the progress and set key performance indicator (KPI) toward achievement ofimplementation. Therefore, a design checklist had been developed and implemented for every design that had been constructed to foresee the achievement of project changes. The checklist contains the safety design consideration suchas layout, physical arrangement, accessibility, alarm sensors, safety buzzer, barriers, man fit task design etc. Thefeedback from employees was taken every week to get input and information on the design and satisfaction of workers in the workplace. The frequency analysis collected from the checklist has been analysed and it showed that the number of frequencies is reducing - indicating the good progress and positiveness of this program. The number of complaints has reduced significantly from 250 to 75, which is a reduction of 70%. The accident rate has been reduced from 60 per year to 15 per year, which is lower by 75% in comparison. Upon the construct of design changes, the awareness and responsibilities toward leadership had been drastically improved at all levels of management and workers. This shows the initiatives to change design have contributed to a positive result on safety culture. Conclusion: In conclusion, thisstudy proves that the change in design is more effective compared to administration action. The study shows that the number of complaints and accidents can be reduced significantly and create a conducive work environment which is close to achieving the safety culture. The basic is to obtain the right people fit for the right job. The focus should be on reliable control actions such as design changes and OSH leadership from top to bottom approach.

Keywords: safety culture; OSH commitment; OSH leadership; top management; workplace design