Supporting compliance with occupational safety and health regulations

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How can we support companies ─ large and small ─ to comply with occupational safety and health (OSH) regulations and to protect workers?

Our research reviews evidence on what drives or hinders OSH compliance. It also reviews the types of support available and explores innovative strategies for enhancing compliance. Different actors such as labour inspectors, prevention services, and company networks support the compliance of enterprises. Supply chains can contribute significantly to better working conditions and OSH, with larger companies often shaping improvements through their market leverage over smaller enterprises.

Key factors influencing OSH compliance

  • Legislation: provides the essential framework for OSH, but is not sufficient on its own to ensure compliance.
  • Enforcement: new and innovative approaches are emerging, for example using AI and digitalisation or co-enforcement approaches.
  • Prevention services: their efficiency, accessibility and suitability to different types of enterprises shape compliance outcomes.
  • Compliance in practice: varies significantly across enterprise sizes, with micro and small businesses facing distinct barriers while large enterprises can be influential drivers of improvement.
  • Business incentives: Success factors such as reputation and productivity, and external incentives from accident insurances or tax benefits can motivate compliance.
  • Supply chains: Increasingly important, as business relationships can raise OSH standards.
  • Social reporting: Societal norms and peer expectations are playing a growing role in shaping OSH behaviour.

Explore our research on effective approaches to OSH compliance

Related resources

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Governance of occupational safety and health in supply chains

Peter Hasle University of Southern Denmark , Wanja Öhler University of Southern Denmark

Introduction

Occupational safety and health (OSH) has a natural focus on the workplaces where humans work. Yet, the development of international supply chains during the last decades is challenging the traditional approach. Contemporary production – both material and immaterial – is organised in extensive supply chain networks where the individual producer controls only a limited part of the complete production process and is very dependent on buyer requirements. Furthermore, downstream multinationals often have the power to govern upstream suppliers. The consequence is that the specification of a product to a considerable extent is decided by – not the producer – but…

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External economic incentives for prevention

Daniela Treutlein TNO, the Netherlands

Introduction

Economic incentives in occupational safety and health (OSH) describe processes that reward organisations for safe and healthy workplaces. From a European perspective, incentives are seen as an effective tool complementary to OSH regulation aimed at encouraging businesses at the management level to provide good OSH. Tax or insurance premium reductions are common examples. A range of economic incentive schemes can be classified along two lines: First, according to the source issuing the incentive, i.e., public governmental authorities or workers’ compensation insurers, and second, according to the mode of operation, i.e., result-based or effort-based…

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