Companies in Malaysia often talk about reducing workplace safety claims as if the claim itself is the problem. In reality, the claim is usually the receipt. What employers actually want is fewer injuries, fewer occupational illnesses, fewer lost workdays, and fewer disruptions that ripple through production schedules, customer timelines, and morale. When safety improves, claims tend to fall as a natural consequence, not because someone got better at managing paperwork, but because fewer people get hurt in the first place.
A useful starting point is understanding what Malaysian workplace protection actually covers, because the scope is wider than many managers assume. Under PERKESO’s Employment Injury Scheme, incidents that can trigger support are not limited to accidents inside the workplace. The scheme recognises commuting accidents, emergency accidents that happen during an emergency at the employer’s premises, and occupational diseases that arise from work exposure. PERKESO even describes commuting accidents as those occurring on the route between home and work, on a journey directly connected to employment, or between the workplace and a place where the employee takes a meal during authorised recess, while also noting that an interruption or deviation can change whether it is treated as work related. It also lists occupational diseases, with examples such as hearing loss due to continuous excessive noise exposure and occupational asthma linked to inhaling dust or harmful chemicals. When employers internalise this broader coverage, they stop designing safety only for the obvious hazard zones and start managing the full reality of work.
The legal expectations point in the same direction. Malaysia’s Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 places a duty on employers to ensure, so far as practicable, the safety, health, and welfare at work of employees, and it spells out that this duty includes maintaining safe plant and systems of work, making arrangements to ensure safe use, handling, storage and transport of plant and substances, and providing information, instruction, training, and supervision necessary for safety and health. It also requires employers, except in prescribed cases, to prepare and revise a written safety and health policy and bring it to employees’ attention. This is not simply about compliance. It is a blueprint for how to reduce claims: design safer systems, control hazards at the source, train people properly, and supervise work so standards are followed when pressure rises.
Reducing claims begins with refusing to treat incidents as random. Most organisations have recurring injuries that repeat with different names, different shifts, or different sites. The way out is to build a routine that turns every job into a manageable risk profile, not a gamble. In Malaysia, the most practical method for this is to make hazard identification and risk control a living discipline, not a one time document exercise. DOSH provides guidelines for Hazard Identification, Risk Assessment and Risk Control, commonly known as HIRARC, and the value of this framework is that it forces teams to look at real tasks as they are performed, identify hazards, assess risk, and implement controls before work continues. When HIRARC is treated as a static file, it becomes irrelevant. When it is treated as the operating manual for how the job is actually done, the workplace begins to change.
What matters most is what organisations do after hazards are identified. Many employers default to reminders, warnings, posters, and PPE because these actions are quick and visible. But claims drop fastest when control measures make it harder for injuries to occur even when people are tired, distracted, or rushed. A company that wants fewer hand injuries should prioritise guarding, safer tooling, and work methods that reduce exposure, rather than relying on repeated reminders to be careful. A company that wants fewer back injuries should examine material flow, load weights, and workstation design, and introduce mechanical assistance where possible, rather than hoping technique alone will solve a system problem. Occupational diseases demand even more discipline because they often develop slowly, and the absence of immediate incidents can create a false sense of safety. Yet PERKESO’s own descriptions make it clear that chronic exposures such as noise and respiratory irritants are part of the risk landscape. When employers manage exposure proactively, claims related to long term harm become less likely over time.
The next lever is participation, because safety improves faster when the people who do the work every day have a structured way to influence how that work is designed. Malaysia has a formal mechanism for this through safety and health committees. DOSH references the Occupational Safety and Health (Safety and Health Committee) Regulations 1996, which sit under the OSH legal ecosystem and provide the basis for how committees operate. In practical terms, the committee should not exist only to satisfy an expectation. It should act as the organisation’s weekly or monthly safety engine, reviewing trends, surfacing blind spots, and pushing corrective actions across departments. A committee that only records minutes but does not close actions will not reduce claims. A committee that tracks hazards raised, assigns owners, sets deadlines, and demands verification will steadily drive down incidents because problems stop being tolerated as normal.
Training is another area where Malaysian companies can make claim reduction almost inevitable when done properly. The OSH Act is explicit that employers’ duties include providing information, instruction, training, and supervision necessary for safety and health. The most effective organisations treat training as a performance system rather than an event. New hires should be trained against the tasks they will actually perform, not just given generic induction slides. High risk roles should have competency verification, not only attendance records. Supervisors should be trained as safety coaches who correct risky behaviour early, because by the time an unsafe shortcut becomes normal, the company is simply waiting for an injury to reveal it. Training that is connected to the real job, reinforced by supervision, and refreshed when processes change will reduce claims in a way that compliance focused training never can.
A major source of repeated claims in many workplaces is contractor work, especially in maintenance, logistics, cleaning, and construction related activities. Malaysian employers sometimes assume contractor incidents are the contractor’s responsibility, but the OSH Act’s language broadens the concept of who counts as an employee for certain duties. It includes independent contractors engaged by an employer and their employees, in relation to matters under the employer’s control, or matters the employer would have controlled without an agreement to the contrary. That means contractor safety is not a side issue if the work happens under your operational environment. Companies reduce claims by tightening contractor onboarding, ensuring permits to work are meaningful, verifying competency, and enforcing site rules consistently, even when timelines are tight. When contractors are treated as part of the operating system rather than outsiders, high risk tasks stop being the place where standards slip first.
Incident reporting and investigation also separate organisations that reduce claims from organisations that merely react to them. The goal is not simply to record what happened, but to prevent the same mechanism from producing the next injury. DOSH’s notification ecosystem requires employers to keep records of accidents and related events, and DOSH specifically notes that Regulation 10 of the Occupational Safety and Health (Notification of Accident, Dangerous Occurrence, Occupational Poisoning and Occupational Disease) Regulations 2004 requires employers to maintain records of all such cases, using Form JKKP 8 as a register, and to submit that register before 31 January each year. It also stresses that employers should record incidents promptly to avoid losing detail. This is more than a reporting duty. It is a reminder that every incident, even a minor cut, is data. When employers use this data to identify recurring hazards and fix root causes, claims decline because the system improves rather than repeating mistakes.
The quality of investigation matters. If investigations conclude with “carelessness” or “did not follow procedure,” the organisation has learned almost nothing. Better investigations ask what made the unsafe act possible or attractive. Was the procedure impractical under real production conditions. Was guarding missing or bypassed. Was there a maintenance backlog that created unsafe improvisation. Did overtime and fatigue make error more likely. Was supervision absent at the moment standards slipped. When corrective actions change the conditions that made the incident likely, rather than only warning workers, the workplace becomes less claim prone because risk is engineered out of daily work.
A less discussed but highly relevant area for claim reduction is commuting and fatigue. PERKESO’s scheme explicitly recognises commuting accidents, and it describes how the route between home and work, job connected journeys, and trips to meals during authorised recess can fall under commuting accident coverage. In industries with shift work, long travel distances, or high overtime, fatigue becomes a hazard that travels home with the employee. Companies that want fewer claims should treat journey risk as part of their safety strategy by designing shift patterns that reduce extreme fatigue, discouraging unsafe rushing at the end of shifts, and creating a culture where employees can report exhaustion without being punished. This is not a soft benefit. It is a direct response to what the protection framework recognises as work connected risk.
Even with strong prevention, incidents can still happen, and companies that reduce the total impact of claims also manage recovery well. PERKESO outlines medical benefits and rehabilitation support, including access to medical treatment and physical or vocational rehabilitation for eligible employees. When employers coordinate early medical attention, maintain communication, and provide suitable duties where feasible, employees often return to productive work earlier, and the organisation reduces the secondary risks that appear when teams are understaffed and rushing. Good return to work practices do not only reduce cost. They also build trust, which encourages earlier reporting of hazards and minor injuries, and that early reporting is one of the most reliable predictors of fewer major incidents later.
As organisations grow, consistency becomes the biggest challenge, which is why many companies adopt an occupational health and safety management system to keep standards stable across sites and leadership changes. ISO 45001 is widely used because it frames safety as a management system built around risk, worker participation, and continual improvement. ISO itself notes that implementing ISO 45001 provides significant value to organisations looking to reduce workplace incidents and demonstrate commitment to occupational health and safety. The practical value is not a certificate. It is the discipline of clear responsibilities, documented controls, audits, and leadership review that keep safety from being deprioritised when business pressure rises.
In the end, Malaysian companies reduce workplace safety claims by shifting focus from the claim to the conditions that produce it. The OSH Act points employers toward safe systems of work, training, supervision, and a clear policy that is understood and practiced, not just filed. DOSH’s HIRARC guidance supports the idea that hazards should be identified, assessed, and controlled as part of everyday operations, not as a once yearly exercise. PERKESO’s scheme reminds employers that risk is not confined to a single work area, because commuting accidents, emergency accidents, and occupational diseases are part of the protection landscape. When leaders treat safety as work design, when committees and supervisors turn frontline observations into closed corrective actions, and when reporting becomes a learning system instead of a blame system, fewer people get hurt. When fewer people get hurt, claims fall because the workplace becomes safer by construction, not by luck.
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