Nothing we do is more important than ensuring that everyone in our industry goes home safe and well, every day. The safety and health of our people is not just a priority — it is a core value that must never be compromised.

This commitment applies to everyone in the steel industry: employees, contractors, business leaders, suppliers, visitors, and customers alike.

Creating and maintaining safe, healthy, and resilient workplaces is a responsibility shared across our global industry. Through visible felt leadership (see the definition below), open engagement, and a relentless focus on risk prevention, we can reduce harmful incidents and promote wellbeing at every level of our organisations.

This guidance supports that commitment. While our principles have stood the test of time, our understanding of safety and health management continues to evolve. New insights — from incident learning, human and organisational performance, and emerging risks — allow us to provide additional context and guidance. This enhanced version reflects those advances, without changing the core
values that unite the global steel industry.

Our aim is to help all companies — regardless of size or maturity — to take practical, meaningful steps to improve safety and health outcomes. Individual companies have different goals and procedures.

The principles can be adapted to meet specific contexts (internal and external) and corporate environments.

Definitions and calculations related to this publication are available in the Safety and health section of worldsteel.org.

Photos: POSCO, Tenaris, Tata Steel, Baotou, Ternium, JSW, HBIS, and EMSTEEL

Safety culture and leadership

The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine how people and systems act and respond in relation to risks and opportunities. Safety culture and leadership evolve gradually over time as people go through various changes, adapt to environmental conditions and solve problems.
To create a truly robust safety culture, organisations need to proactively position safety as an integral value for all workers. Continuous learning — from both successes and setbacks — is essential to this process. To attain this level of safety culture, significant commitment and a drive towards continuous improvement are required (More here).

Occupational safety management

Occupational safety management promotes the safety of employees, contractors and visitors by preventing personal injuries in the workplace, and has a strong focus on primary prevention of exposure to hazards. It requires not only identifying hazards, but continuously anticipating how work is done, where it may vary, and what might go wrong. Prevention is most effective when people closest to the work are actively involved, and when lessons from everyday operations — not just incidents — are used to improve systems and controls.

Occupational health management

In its widest definition, occupational health management encompasses the physical and mental wellbeing of the people working in the company. Focus should be placed on the long-term effects of exposure to hazards. The health of workers has several determinants, including risk factors at the workplace leading to cancers, musculoskeletal diseases, respiratory diseases, hearing loss, circulatory diseases, stress-related disorders and others.

Equally critical are risks, such as chronic stress, fatigue, isolation, or lack of control over one’s work, which can significantly affect mental health, engagement and performance. These risks must also be actively identified, monitored and addressed through a combination of workplace design, organisational support, leadership behaviours, and access to appropriate support services. Promoting resilience and an environment where workers can share their concerns freely without fear of blame or punishment is fundamental (More here).

Process safety management

Process safety is a blend of engineering, operations and management skills focused on prevention of, preparedness for, mitigation of, response to, and restoration from catastrophic releases of hazardous substances or energy from a process.

The manufacturing of steel involves processes with intrinsic hazards that need careful management. The measures needed to control these hazards are often complex. The focus of process safety management is not limited to protecting the people within the company but also includes the environment, assets and surrounding community from events such as structural collapse, explosions, fires and toxic releases associated with loss of containment of energy or dangerous substances such as toxic gases, molten metal, chemicals and petroleum products (More here).

All injuries and work-related illness can and must be prevented.

A preventive focus on safety and health should be part of the organisation’s strategic goals. Some important components of this are:

Management is responsible and accountable for safety and health performance.

Leaders need to be role models and consistently demonstrate visible felt leadership.

This lends credibility to each task, builds trust among all stakeholders and reinforces safety and health as an integral value.

Leaders should ensure a safe and healthy workplace by empowering and supporting people to identify and freely report potential risks and develop effective controls to keep them safe.

Priorities and objectives should be set based on risk, with leaders ensuring that the necessary resources are provided for effective safety and health management.

Leaders should use continuous encouragement and recognition to reinforce positive behaviours and initiatives.

By consistently recognising and reinforcing actions that contribute to reducing risks and caring for others, leaders help to sustain a proactive safety culture.

A psychologically safe environment — one where people feel free to speak up, ask questions and report concerns without fear of blame — should be provided to all employees and contractors.

Employees and contractors should have easy access to platforms where they can share any concerns and suggestions for improvement without fear of repercussions.

While managers carry the ultimate accountability for safety and health performance, creating a safe and healthy workplace is a shared responsibility — one that depends on the active participation, insight and care of everyone.

Worker engagement and training is essential.

Everyone must be involved in a meaningful way, daily, to support prevention of injury and occupational illness.

Through constant exposure to safe practices, people will develop behaviour that ensures each task is performed safely. It is essential to learn from both what went wrong, and what went well.

Engaged and empowered employees will choose to work safely themselves and ensure others do as well. They will also feel comfortable contributing their ideas for safety and health improvement and act on safety incident risks and opportunities.

Workers’ experiences and daily learnings should be considered when designing processes/workplaces, developing procedures and work instructions, and conducting risk assessments and investigations.

All employees and contractors should receive the necessary training to be competent in managing the safety and health risks associated with their jobs and know how to identify and report problems early on.

Training should reflect how work is done — including variability, trade-offs, and the realities people face — so that people are equipped to recognise and manage risks in the real world, not just the ideal one.

Organisational memory should be actively maintained through accessible repositories, mentoring, and structured onboarding processes, ensuring that lessons learned from past events are not lost across generations or geographies.

Working safely is a condition of employment.

Excellence in safety and health drives excellent business results.

Prevention of injuries and occupational illnesses creates a competitive advantage by having our most valuable resource – our people – at work.

Caring about the wellbeing of our people is the essence of successful leadership.

A safe and healthy workforce makes a better performing organisation. To invest in safety and health is to improve productivity and performance.

Potential serious injuries and fatalities and their root causes should be identified, and the allocation of resources for their prevention should be prioritised.

All employees and contractors should have easy access to physical and mental health support services. A healthy work environment and lifestyle should be promoted at all levels to enhance productivity, innovation, and trust in the organisation.

Safety and health must be integrated into all business management practices.

Safety and health should not be treated as being separate from business, or an overhead, but should be included and integrated into all new and existing business processes, for example, managing assets, production, projects and administration.

Safety and health-related goals must be defined for all functions and every individual must be held accountable for matters within their own sphere of influence.

Risk should be reassessed before any changes are applied, by cross-functional teams involving people with different levels of experience to ensure a thorough appraisal following a management of change (MoC) process.

Organisations’ safety and health management systems should recognise that contractors may have their own safety and health management systems and should ensure that the organisations’ requirements are practical and avoid unnecessary duplication with contractors’ systems.

The World Steel Association (worldsteel) is one of the largest and most dynamic industry associations in the world, with members in every major steel-producing country. worldsteel represents steel producers, national and regional steel industry associations, and steel research institutes. Members represent around 85% of global steel production.