International Journal of Applied Marketing and Management

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Revitalise and Fast-Track Safety Culture in Industry or Face Incidents/Losses


Affiliations
1 Professor of Psychology (Retd.), SNDT Women’s University, Director – Forum of Behavioural Safety, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
     

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Safety culture is what we call people’s safe behaviours. Safety culture is a fast-growing wave in the industry today. Addressing gaps in building a long-term supportive safety culture for companies underlines a set of unresolved questions on behavioural risk management in the industry, and possible solutions. Everyone raises a voice for safety, then safety culture comes into existence and the risk disappears – is it so simple? Most companies delay their HSE decisions till they suffer. Why so? Without inculcating safety as a core corporate value, the industry cannot be considered safe. Behavioural safety culture is a live surveillance on the risks and their spot-correction to ensure that the safety culture building process is active. Safety culture behaviour is necessary to overcome incidents and accidents at the work sites. Behavioural safety education for one and all is the safety culture being addressed 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 the industry, and the possible solutions. The data were collected from 603 industry professionals who were the study participants. The sampling method was a non-random convenience sampling. A set of ten themes of research findings reflected upon critical issues, such as basic questions on long-term safety cultures; reactive safety culture; collective voice and leadership for at-risk behaviours; religion, spirituality, and festivities for safety at sites; implementation of safety with a consideration for others; features of companies not empowering their workforce for performing safety implementation; competency gap among the safety professionals; the major roadblocks in HSE decision-making; the spot-implementation of behaviour-based safety (BBS) approach by top leaders; and myriad factors to advance the success of a long-term supportive safety culture. Fast-tracking supportive safety culture at sites would mean the next level of hard work.

Keywords

Behaviour, Risk, Safety, Culture, Qualitative
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  • Revitalise and Fast-Track Safety Culture in Industry or Face Incidents/Losses

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Authors

Harbans Lal
Professor of Psychology (Retd.), SNDT Women’s University, Director – Forum of Behavioural Safety, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Abstract


Safety culture is what we call people’s safe behaviours. Safety culture is a fast-growing wave in the industry today. Addressing gaps in building a long-term supportive safety culture for companies underlines a set of unresolved questions on behavioural risk management in the industry, and possible solutions. Everyone raises a voice for safety, then safety culture comes into existence and the risk disappears – is it so simple? Most companies delay their HSE decisions till they suffer. Why so? Without inculcating safety as a core corporate value, the industry cannot be considered safe. Behavioural safety culture is a live surveillance on the risks and their spot-correction to ensure that the safety culture building process is active. Safety culture behaviour is necessary to overcome incidents and accidents at the work sites. Behavioural safety education for one and all is the safety culture being addressed 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 the industry, and the possible solutions. The data were collected from 603 industry professionals who were the study participants. The sampling method was a non-random convenience sampling. A set of ten themes of research findings reflected upon critical issues, such as basic questions on long-term safety cultures; reactive safety culture; collective voice and leadership for at-risk behaviours; religion, spirituality, and festivities for safety at sites; implementation of safety with a consideration for others; features of companies not empowering their workforce for performing safety implementation; competency gap among the safety professionals; the major roadblocks in HSE decision-making; the spot-implementation of behaviour-based safety (BBS) approach by top leaders; and myriad factors to advance the success of a long-term supportive safety culture. Fast-tracking supportive safety culture at sites would mean the next level of hard work.

Keywords


Behaviour, Risk, Safety, Culture, Qualitative

References