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The paper is summing up the developments in the understanding of safety management in industrial companies, especially concentrating on features that seem to be most prevalent for the companies demonstrating good safety performance. The review is based on the knowledge and experiences from the practice of industrial accident insurance as well as on the findings of the selected health and safety literature. The elements of success include e.g. good overall management, safety goals and competence requirements defined for managers, visibility and commitment by top management, rewarding and incentives for safe work, effective learning from accidents and incidents and continuous improvement using risk assessments, effective safety inspections and internal audits, as well as participative leadership practices including good communication and trust. The experiences show the need for holistic management as a basis towards the long-term development for safety excellence, rather than implementing single tricks and solutions. During the recent years, safety management systems in particular have been established in highly developed economies, thus improving the formal safety management approach. In the future, there seems to be a need to better tackle the more informal processes in safety, i.e. human behaviour, attitudes and safety culture. Furthermore, the complexity of health and safety call for the improvement of the general management theory to better tackle the complex human-centred issues in management.

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