Sustain Leadership Inspiration in Supportive Safety Culture for Grass-Root Change

Abstract

Leaders who do not learn new aspects of doing business in terms of positive safety culture shall be automatically rendered out of business by their world competitors and they would learn in a hard and expensive ways to adapt to a new order of safe work culture. Understanding the core principles of positive safety culture as a behavioural science intervention, the president operations of a group of chemical plants felt and urged all leaders in a meeting that they must relook and review the company HSE policy. While the director operations responded that he would convince his board of directors in this direction, and be very supportive to all plants for the resources required in terms of manpower, finance or infrastructure, etc. This article discusses the challenges and solutions to sustain leadership inspiration in supportive safety culture for grass-root changes. The recommendations are made based on the field visits to 10 site locations and interactions with 257 managers and 250 contractors workmen. Major conclusions are: a) Indian employers have to aim high to be global in safety standards and culture to be global in business. b) Safety culture board team need to be a solution provider at the ground. c) Corporate leadership looks at the larger socio-familial context of their own employees that no one gets injured on any single working day. d) Leadership visible presence on the ground for inspiring positive safety culture. e) The finer role of corporate leadership is to seek inspiration from grassroots leadership and also support for change. f) Human errors often hurdle the safety culture which can be managed by the concept implementation of a totally safe organisation. In a safety culture, human errors are not punished, as they are seen as opportunities to improve and learn from underlying system problems. A sustained safety culture is not only behaviour-based, but also value-based, a corporate value which is a long-term intervention.

Keywords: Safety, Culture, Corporate, Managers, Workmen

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