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Programme-Based Engagement
Ministry of Manpower
Singapore

The Problem

Over the past few decades, Singapore has achieved significant improvements in Workplace Safety and Health (WSH). From more than 6 industry accidents occurring for every million man hours worked in the 1980s, numbers have dipped to below 3 since the mid-1990s and remained that way ever since. However, the government recognized that fatalities and injuries were still happening at workplaces, and since 2000, industry accident rate had been stagnating at around 2.2 accidents per million man-hours worked.

The Singapore Government strongly believes that every single worker should have the right to return home after a day of work safe and alive, and this has guided efforts by the Ministry of Manpower in this area. However, three major industrial accidents which occurred in 2004 claimed 13 lives, and became a stern reminder that we ignore safety and health risks at our peril, and more needed to be done to shape better behavior and outcomes at the workplace to protect our workers.

Statistically, though 4.9 out of 100,000 fatalities in workplace accidents in 2004 compared favorably regionally, it was more than double the rate in developed countries, with Sweden, for example, registering 1.0 out of 100,000 fatalities in workplace accidents in that same year. It became clear that if Singapore continued using the same approach, there will only be incremental improvements at best. A fundamental reform to our WSH framework was thus needed to achieve quantum improvement and sustained continuous improvement in our WSH standards.

The new WSH framework was unveiled in March 2005, and the introduction of the Workplace Safety and Health Act (WSHA) followed on 1 March 2006 to replace the decades old prescriptive Factories Act. However, even though the WSHA is a key instrument to effect a cultural change under the new WSH framework, it is not the solution. Singapore needed to take a national, strategic and a long term approach towards workplace safety and health.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The WSHA emphasizes the importance of managing WSH proactively, by requiring stakeholders to take reasonably practicable measures that ensure the safety and health of all individuals affected in their course of work. The Programme-based Engagement (ProBE) initiative was thus launched in 2006 as a key initiative of the Government’s Strategic WSH Engagement Framework and important cornerstone in helping Singapore achieve a targeted reduction in national workplace fatality rate from 4.9 per 100,000 workers in 2004, to 2.5 per 100,000 workers in 2015.

Based on findings from fatal industrial accident data and statistics gathered from 2002 – 2005, MOM identified four priority programmes for the pilot ProBE run in 2006, namely the Working at Heights Programme, Scaffold Programme, Metalworking Programme and Confined Space Programme. Compared to 2004 figures and average figures from 2002 – 2005, vast improvements have been observed in terms of fatality:

Total Fatalities:
37% reduction from 4.9 per 100,000 workers (in 2004) to 3.1 per 100,000 workers (in 2006).

Scaffold and Staging:
40% reduction from 15 fatalities in 2004 to 9 in 2006 (10.5 average from 2002 – 2005)

Metalworking:
83% reduction from 6 fatalities in 2004 to 1 in 2006 (5.25 average from 2002 – 2005)

Confined space:
88% reduction from 8 fatalities in 2004 to 1 in 2006 (4 average from 2002 – 2005)

Compared to past initiatives, ProBE represented a paradigm shift in policy objective, structure and execution, and that helped significantly in creating the necessary shift in mindset for greater buy-in. From regulators and enforcers, MOM now played the role of partners in ensuring workers enjoy safe and healthy workplaces, and workplace fatality is reduced. In fact, companies were informed in advance that inspections would be taking place, and they were offered the same checklists inspectors were equipped with during their inspection rounds. This ensured that companies did not look at inspections resentfully, but looked at it as a consistent, firm and fair enforcement activity against non-compliance, necessary to reduce occupational fatalities in high-risk areas.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
This initiative was born from a simple idea from MOM’s Occupational Safety and Health Division (OSHD) that enforcement should be targeted for greater efficiency and effectiveness as these efforts were funded through public money. This idea slowly developed, through discussions within the Ministry, and with consultation with external parties and stakeholders, including major industry players, trade unions like the National Trade Union Corporation (NTUC), as well as industry associations such as the Singapore Contractors Association Limited (SCAL) and the Association of Singapore Marine Industries (ASMI), through the Workplace Safety and Health Advisory Committee (WSHAC). The outcome was an engagement-centric programme aimed at assisting the industry to manage WSH risks through building competencies within the industries.

From formulation to implementation, there was active communication amongst all parties, not only to allow them to understand the rationale and secure their buy-in, but also to tap on their expertise and garner their ideas. The underlying message was clear – that WSH was not just the government’s responsibility; the responsibility belongs to everyone. Through this engagement process, a clear mindset shift was observed.

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The three key thrusts that form the foundation and strategic support for ProBE are:

Thrust 1 - Focusing Effort Where It Matters:
ProBE has been designed to focus intervention efforts on priority areas to stem the root causes of safety and health deficiencies. This approach allows MOM to deploy its regulatory efforts where they are needed most to bring about quantum improvements in safety performance and maximum benefit for workers and employers.

Thrust 2 - Engaging Stakeholders through Partnership and Working Well Together:
MOM recognizes that partnership with stakeholders is paramount to the success of ProBE. It provides a common platform for MOM and the various stakeholders to work together to improve the safety and health situation for the targeted industries. There will be opportunities for sharing knowledge, which will foster closer partnerships and enhance synergy between MOM and Industry.

Thrust 3 - Applying a Multi-Dimensional Approach Towards Raising Safety Standards:
The main focus of ProBE is to engage partnerships and co-operation for a common outcome rather than enforce standards. While higher penalties for poor safety management have been introduced, MOM will implement outreach-based education and promotional efforts as a preferred initial solution.

The ProBE process can be broken down into 5 key phases:

Phase 1 - Intel Phase:
MOM identifies the problematic areas that are chiefly contributing to fatal and serious accidents through the analyses of accident statistics, data, trending and reports to arrive at priority programmes for ProBE to target.

Phase 2 - Industry Preparatory Phase:
This step of the ProBE is the key focus of this initiative. In this phase, the aim is to conduct outreach activities to communicate the underlying reasons for the poor performance and to build competencies to manage these risks. This will help industry to improve safety management systems and work processes. MOM views this drive as a partnership between MOM and industry such as the WSHAC in working towards a common goal to improve safety and health standards.

Phase 3 - Operation Phase:
MOM Inspectorate Officers conduct a comprehensive series of workplace inspections to detect contraventions and push Industry to improve standards. The enforcement approach applied will depend on the performance level of the targeted workplaces.

Phase 4 - Monitoring Phase:
MOM continues to monitor the targeted sectors to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme. An improvement in safety performance of the targeted sector is indicative of overall effectiveness of the programme.

Phase 5 - Closure and Communications Phase:
This marks the completion of the ProBE process and MOM publishes its findings.

Based on findings from fatal industrial accident data and statistics gathered from 2002 – 2005, MOM identified four priority programmes for the pilot ProBE run in 2006, namely the Work at Heights Programme, Scaffold Programme, Metalworking Programme and Confined Space Programme.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
1. Creating a Brand:
A key milestone of ProBE implementation was to create a powerful branding that industry, partners and key stakeholders can instantly recognize and identify with. The key challenge was the need for the brand to be simple, catchy, but yet, symbolizing the essence of the initiative. After rounds of deliberation, the name ProBE was eventually chosen for the programme. ProBE signifies the targeted and “probing” nature of the programme to identify key hotspot areas and finding practical solutions to the problem. Today, the ProBE brand is widely recognized throughout the industry and participation in the programme has been extremely encouraging.

2. Creating Awareness:
ProBE is a consequential product of a new approach by MOM towards raising WSH standards in the industry – to channel resources and efforts towards areas where it matters most. This targeted approach allows optimal utilization of available resources, as well as creates a positive impact to workplace practices and processes that pose significant risks to workers.

As this significant development differed greatly from previous traditional approaches of non-targeted or random selection of workplaces for engagement, there was a need to inform and update the industry and stakeholders of this new approach and the programme proper. A major launch event to mark the commencement of the year’s programmes, typically graced by a senior political office bearer such as the Minister of State (Manpower) or Senior Parliamentary Secretary, adds weight and emphasizes the importance of the ProBE initiatives. Also, mass media is used extensively to heighten public awareness to ensure that the ProBE messages will reach a wider audience. There would usually be press coverage for each of the ProBE launch, and subsequently, at most of the individual programme launch.

3. Sharing of Checklists:
Another key milestone of ProBE is the open sharing of the inspection checklist pertaining to the topic covered under a particular programme, with the industry. This is the same checklists that were used by Ministry’s inspectors during their routine inspections at the workplaces. The intention is to highlight to the industry the key areas that present significant risks so that the industry can focus their intervention and recovery efforts to manage these risks at their respective workplaces.

4. Post Ops Engagement:
A wealth of information and data, not only on industry performance, but also on common shortcomings and key areas of weakness is typically collated and analyzed after the operations phase. The collated information not only forms an invaluable input for future operations planning, but the information would also be shared with industry, as part of the post-ops engagement, to further guide them on how to manage their industry-specific risks and improve WSH standards. These information-sharing sessions could be in the form of workshops, seminars, dialogues with stakeholders or through the mass media such as press releases in the local newspapers.

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
1. Engaging the industry as partners, not regulators:
As the name suggests, ProBE’s key feature is to raise industry capability to manage WSH risks primarily through strategic engagement. However a significant challenge in this effort is to assure and convince the industry that MOM’s role in ProBE is that of a partner to the industry, and not of an enforcer, an image the industry is unfortunately more accustomed to in the past.

To overcome this obstacle, MOM would conduct focus group sessions with the industry to understand from them what their concerns and challenges were in managing WSH risks at their workplaces, and also to seek their comments and advice on what needs to be done to improve WSH standards within the industry. MOM would subsequently formulate policies and develop programmes based on these industry feedbacks to address the performance shortfalls. In doing so, MOM would be able to understand the true concerns and needs of the industry, as well as to promote greater industry ownership.

2. What’s acceptable and practicable to industry:
A key feature of ProBE is that for each of the programme, a Technical Advisory relating to a particular focus area will be developed for the industry. The Technical Advisory is intended to provide a comprehensive and practical guidance on some of the best practices in managing the risks in the said focus area. In the development of the Technical Advisory, a key challenge is to ensure that the content is relevant and purposeful, and one that is readily applied and adopted by the industry. As such, the relevant industry stakeholders were invited to provide inputs and comment on the Technical Advisory prior to its publication and final release.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
Within MOM, the conceptualization and implementation of ProBE utilizes a wide array of technical, managerial and administrative expertise spanning across the whole of its Occupational Safety and Health Division (OSHD). This would include the collective efforts of staff from the Policy, Planning, Specialists, Inspectorate, Statistics, Outreach as well as the IT and publication departments.

Further, the Workplace Safety and Health Advisory Committee (WSHAC) would organize a series of dedicated engagement activities through its outreach events, media conferences and collaterals to raise public awareness of hazards at the workplaces and to build industry capability to manage these hazards.

However, it must be emphasized that the success of ProBE hinges significantly on the contributions and participation of key industry expertise and stakeholders. For example, a ProBE programme targeting the confined space industry included the participation of eminent industry leaders such as the global oil and petrochemical majors who were invited to share their confined space best practices and exemplary work procedures. The involvement of such industry players provides a common platform for MOM and industry stakeholders to collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal of improving the safety and health standards in the targeted areas.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
ProBE has been branded as a strategic engagement programme that has been designed to focus intervention efforts on priority areas to stem the root causes of safety and health deficiencies. This approach allows MOM to deploy its regulatory efforts where they are needed most to bring about quantum improvements in safety performance and maximum benefit for workers and employers. The thematic concept of ProBE also allows for MOM to target and focus on different WSH topics at any given time so that adequate resources can be channeled to address WSH areas that matter most in order to achieve tangible results.

MOM is also heartened to note that the industry has also taken its own initiatives to synchronize its corporate WSH calendar with the ProBE priority programmes in order to ride on and reap the benefits from the various ProBE activities organized at the national level. Going forward, ProBE would take on a more sustained approach through the increased participation of the industry stakeholders. An ideal end state would be when ProBE becomes a completely industry-owned programme where the industry proactively identifies the ProBE priority programmes based on their industry sensing and thereafter planned out specific intervention actions to remedy the situation. This outcome would be in line with the Ministry’s efforts to promote industry ownership of WSH outcomes at the workplace.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
We learnt that we needed to incorporate ground sensing when analyzing statistics. Broad-based statistics were used initially to shortlist problematic areas. These broad-based statistics were collected by public incident reporting and did not reflect the underlying root causes behind the problem areas. Therefore, a more rigorous and deeper analysis was performed by the ProBE workgroup, not only based on the compilation of accident investigation findings, but also through feedback from officers on the ground, and industry sub-committees in the Workplace Safety and Health Advisory Committees. The focus for the ProBE programmes was then founded on this analysis.

One objective of industry engagement was to promote ownership and participation, and this was done through seminars and workshops organized by MOM and its strategic partners such as Workplace Safety and Health Advisory Committee. However, we learnt that this may not be most effective, as some of the best practices shared, while good in theory, were not practical, and failed to receive buy-in from industry players. To overcome this, MOM incorporated dialogues and encouraged two-way communication to share problem areas and through a facilitated process, co-create practical solutions and measures that are feasible in their own workplaces. Since these solutions came from industry players themselves, there was visibly higher ownership and buy-in.

In terms of enforcement and inspections, due to dynamic and cyclical natures of businesses, inspections on targeted areas could eventually end up as possible hit and miss situations. Addresses registered with the Ministry could no longer become relevant during inspection time, and this resulted in inefficiency in deployment of the Ministry’s operational resources. To counter this, inspectors actually make phone calls to factory occupiers to inform them of the inspection, and check on factory details before embarking on inspections. This represents a shift in enforcement mindset, where the objective of inspections used to be to surface and prosecute as many cases of non-compliance as possible, to one that ensures these companies puts into practice good WSH practices.

Monitoring is a key element of ProBE, but the monitoring system was largely based on broad accident statistics and was not deemed useful since there was typically a lag time between implementation of any programme before visible improvements can be observed. In response to this, statistics are now being measured both for mid- and long-term. For mid-term monitoring, statistics are monitored six months prior to the commencement, as well as six months after conclusion of the ProBE programme. In addition, the statistics will also be monitored over the years to monitor long-term trends. Notwithstanding that, the team also uses secondary indicators as a proxy to the effectiveness of the programme. For example, in the ProBE on Confined Space, a useful proxy will be the number of companies engaged that have implemented confined space entry programme as an outcome of our engagement/inspection. A high level of implementation will indicate success to the programme.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   Ministry of Manpower
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Mohd Ismadi Bin Mohd
Title:   Senior Assistant Director (Policy & Planning) OSHD  
Telephone/ Fax:  
Institution's / Project's Website:  
E-mail:   ismadi_mohd@mom.gov.sg  
Address:   18 Havelock Road
Postal Code:   059764
City:   Singapore
State/Province:   Singapore
Country:   Singapore

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