Abstract
Corporates must prevent fatal incidents for employees and contract workers, and fulfil business ambitions with the supportive safety culture. It is important that we promote a culture of holistic well-being for every individual in the global industry. Despite efforts, fatalities numbers are still very high: how to stop it? The present qualitative study comprised of field visits to 10 site locations, of which 250 managers and 235 contractors’ staff were sampled across diverse Indian locations. Organisations and government must check during regular audits to identify what is lacking to stop fatalities in terms of: multiple actions at all leadership levels, stakeholders levels, stringent rule to imprison occupier of the company in case of fatality, imbibe safety over urgency of work completion, quarterly BBS audit, ensuring that interventions are implemented as planned, re-emphasising basic concepts, rejuvenate safety systems, managers to control the swing safety culture, recognise and accept challenges, combination of business strategy along with safety ethics and change is required at all levels. Managers to be held accountable for lack of safety culture. Identify challenges and effectiveness measures of the corporates’ safety culture in terms of: Actions and decisions are not matching with managements’ words. Gaps between theoretically drawn safety culture roadmap and its practical implementation to be addressed at sites. A case study of supportive safety culture is also presented for ease of understanding gaps in safety culture implementation at sites. This study reveals that building a robust safety culture ecosystem in any organisation is not as simple and straight forward, as it would involve multiple issues (behavioural, psychological, human and organisational), multiple actions (by all leadership levels) and multiple levels (all stakeholders). Employers need to be little more kind and compassionate, a little above their concerns over production and profits that they can surely act more actively to stop all workplace fatalities. Strengthening beliefs, that the positive safety culture, is not a set of religious or flowery contents, but a behavioural science intervention. In this direction, this paper would guide corporates towards a zero-fatality and zero-harm cultural, ethical, social, management and legal objectives.
Keywords: Corporates, Business, Fatalities, Safety, Culture, Zero-Harm, BBS
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