Fast-tracking Safety Culture in Industry or Face Incidents/Losses

By : Harbans Lal Kaila

Page No: 143-169

Abstract:
Safety culture is a fast growing wave in industry today. Addressing gaps in building longterm supportive safety culture for companies underlines a set of unresolved questions on behavioural risks management in industry and possible solutions. Everyone raises voice for safety, safety culture comes and risk disappears, is it so simple? Most companies delayed their HSE decisions till they suffered. Why so? Without inculcating safety as a core corporate value, industry can not be considered safe. Behavioural safety culture is a live surveillance on the risks and their spotcorrection to ensure that the safety culture building process is kept on. Behaviouralisation of safety culture is necessary to overcome incidents and accidents at sites. Behavioural Safety Education to one and all is the safety culture being addressed by the most. Ideologies on safety cultures vary across the industries in terms of practices. The present article dwelt on identifying the unresolved critical questions on behavioural safety supportive culture implementation in industry and raised possible solutions. The data were collected from 603 industry professionals as being study participants. The sampling method was a non-random convenience sampling. A set of ten themes of research findings reflected upon the critical issues such as basic questions on Longterm safety cultures; Reactive safety culture; Collective voice and leadership for at-risk behaviours; Religion, spirituality, festivities for safety at sites; Implementation of safety with feeling for others; Features of companies not empowering their workforce for performing safety implementation; Competencies gap amongst the safety professionals, the major roadblocks in HSE decisions-making, the spot-implementation of behavior based safety (BBS) approach by top leaders, and myriad factors to advance the success of longterm supportive safety culture. Fast-tracking supportive safety culture at sites would mean the next levels of hard work.

Author :
Harbans Lal
Harbans Lal, earned his Masters’ degree in Psychology from Guru Nanak Dev University, and PhD from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Served SNDT Women’s University and the Central Labour Institute, Mumbai for more than 28 years. Represented India in Conferences in New York, Berlin, Muscat, Rome, New Zealand, Japan, London, Dubai, Cairo and Sydney. Is the Editor of the Journal of Psychosocial Research. Director of the Forum of Behavioural Safety and has conducted >1000 behavioural safety programs for industry.
 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32381/JPR.2022.17.01.13