Safety culture:
“The way we do things around here".
In India, mostly large companies take safety as an important norm and are implementing safety
culture. Prime contractors push responsibility onto the sub-contractors. The factors influencing
the implementing the high degree of safety in India is Client, Contractor, Scale and cost of the
project.
Transformation of safety culture in India:
Increased awareness about OHS resulted in transformation of safety culture. With global players
coming into the industry safety is developing. But due to lack of legal enforcement, small and
medium contractors fail to implement it on site. Safe practices reduce the overhead costs associated
with insurance premium, damage recovery, and accident workers compensation.
Major Violations happening at site:
Wrong Storage Practices Improperly maintained tools Lack of Illumination
Unsafe Access Inadequate Ventilation Unsafe use of machine
Poor Housekeeping Strollers & Trespassers Unsafe Material Handling
Path to perfect safety
The safe practices can be practiced in India only when the workers and management realizes true
importance of the safety. For this to be done the workers/management mind set should be changed.
To have positive or good safety culture, the organizations must pass the HSE Culture Ladder.
It comprises of following 5 levels:
Pathological: 'Who cares about safety as long as we are not caught?'
Reactive: 'Safety is important: We do a lot every time, we have an accident'.
Calculative: 'We have all systems in place to manage all hazards'.
Proactive: 'We try to anticipate safety problems before they arise'.
Generative: 'HSE is how we do business here'.
There is challenge in developing a positive safety culture which is favorable to good safety
performance.
Integration of Positive Safety Culture and Good Safety Culture
A good safety culture must be an informed culture, a reporting culture and a just culture.
Informed Culture: Everybody in the organization understands and respects the hazards facing their
operations.
Reporting Culture: People are prepared to report their errors, near misses and other free lessons. It
is also important to report successes. But to report, the organization must have a non-blaming
atmosphere.
Just Culture: It is an atmosphere of trust, people are encouraged, even rewarded for providing
essential safety-related information, and in which is also clear that what behavior is acceptable and
what is unacceptable.
Plan to achieve the desired state of safety
• Management Commitment
Reporting System
Communicate
Organizational Learning
Rules and Procedure
Training & Awareness
• Site Commitment
Inspections and audits
Pep talks
Prevent known hazards
Follow rules and procedures
Continuous improvement
Measurement of Safety
No. of accidents
𝑭𝒓𝒆𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒚 𝑹𝒂𝒕𝒆, 𝑭𝑹 = x 106
No. of human-hours work
No. of human-days lost
𝑺𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝑹𝒂𝒕𝒆, 𝑹 = x 106
No. of human-hours work
Total manhours lost
𝑺𝒂𝒇𝒆𝒕𝒚 𝑷𝒆𝒓𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝑭𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒐𝒓, 𝑺𝑷𝑭 =
Total No. of incidents
Risk Matrix
Sustainability and Safety
Safety is at the core of sustainability. Sustainability really comes down to three principles:
“Doing no harm” starts with the people closest to
the business; no organization can credibly claim
sustainability while continuing to have life-
altering injuries and fatalities or environmental
incidents. “Leaving no footprint” helps leaders
address product life cycle issues and the means by
which products are made and delivered. “Doing
some good” represents the fundamental value an
organization adds, which may go beyond basic
products and services. Safety leaders can support
these principles through sharing their experience
in effecting organizational change for good.
Like safety, sustainability is not about a function
or department doing sustainability (or safety). It’s
about running the business in a way that’s
consistent with guiding principles. Total Quality
Management and process safety are great
examples of this. They each evolved away from
standalone functions (often through integrated management systems). Sustainability also must find
its way into the organization’s day-to-day activities. Safety leaders can offer invaluable expertise
in how to embed and sustain principles into engineering, systems, processes and culture.
For sustainability to be anything more than a marketing spin, its principal activities must be framed
with a view to an organization’s end-to-end effects. Safety leaders have considerable expertise in
this area. Over the past 40 years, environmental, health and safety leaders have developed models
that have broadened our understanding of everything from injury causation to culture – in turn
transforming solutions, activities and results. As with safety, an effective sustainability framework
helps the organization see past immediate effects to those that will be felt long after a product has
left the building.
Building a foundation
“Do no harm” to people or the planet in our activities
or our organization.
Leave no footprint.
Do some good along the way.
Turning principle into practice; Creating an end-to-end framework.
