Awards to evaluate safety culture, leadership and worker participation
Categories for large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises
Applications close in October, awards ceremony in early December
The Korea Enterprises Federation is launching a search for companies with exemplary safety practices as part of efforts to spread a stronger safety culture across industrial sites.
The federation said Wednesday that it is opening applications for the third Safety Culture Innovation Awards. The awards were created in 2024 to identify companies that have voluntarily established strong safety cultures, share those examples across industry, and encourage broader efforts to prevent serious industrial accidents.
Industry has increasingly treated safety as a core management priority in recent years. Beyond preventing serious accidents, this now includes safety management of partner firms, worker participation on site and the establishment of safety and health management systems. Observers say that as the Serious Accidents Punishment Act has expanded to cover smaller workplaces, building genuine safety management capacity — regardless of company size — has become increasingly important.
This year's awards are divided into two categories: large companies, and small and medium-sized enterprises, including mid-sized firms. The federation plans to select one grand prize winner and one excellence award winner in each category.
Judging will focus on five main areas: efforts to spread a safety culture, safety and health leadership and practices by management, the establishment and operation of safety and health management systems, the level of labor-management cooperation and worker participation, and cooperation on safety and health between principal contractors and subcontractors.
The selection process runs through document review, on-site inspection and final judging. The federation's secretariat will first review submitted documents and detailed evaluation criteria. It will then visit candidate companies in person to confirm that what is described in their applications matches actual practices on the ground. This includes in-depth interviews with workers at the site.
A panel of experts from business, labor and academia will determine the final winners, based on a combination of the document review and on-site inspection results.
This year, the federation plans to focus on how each company's safety culture is actually reflected in day-to-day operations on site, rather than simply whether a system or campaign exists on paper. The aim is to examine whether safety genuinely factors into management decisions and workers' daily routines.
The deadline for submitting applications is Oct. 12, and supporting documents, including the application report, must be submitted by Oct. 16. The awards ceremony is scheduled for early December.
"A safety culture cannot be built through a particular system or program alone — it must take root in how companies make decisions and how work is done on the ground," said Lee Dong-keun, vice chairman of the Korea Enterprises Federation. "Through this call for applications, we hope to bring to light examples of companies driving this kind of change on site and help spread them across industry as a whole."
kwater@heraldcorp.com
