Sustaining Safety Culture: Industry Insights from 200 Case Studies across Sectors

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21357279

Harbans Lal Kaila (Organisational Psychology (Retd.) SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, Maharashtra)

Ethical work culture for corporates remains a gamble or double standard between corporate profits and safety. The safety culture is best dependent upon the corporates’ unity of response and their determination, and it is worst when people speak but they are not heard by the management, and when management expects from employees but they don’t listen to employees’ expectations (DCM Shriram, 2026). This research is based on the twenty indices retrieved from the success stories of strong safety cultures of 200 case studies spanning the past 25 years, from the years 2001 to 2025, including diverse industry sectors. Globally, companies have used mixed frameworks for benchmarking their holistic safety cultures. They need clarity about the human performance improvements in order to prevent fires and fatal incidents in the industry. Major objective of this research is to explore the sustainability factors of success of safety culture based on insights of case studies over the years across industry and suggest practical recommendations. In this regard, the implementation of the concepts of psychological safety at workplaces are neccessary. The industry insights on how companies achieve their safety culture transformation are useful to understand that the root cause of at-risk behaviours and the safety incidents is in organisational behaviour. Why do companies lose the strength of their safety culture after a few years of implementation? It is of great importance to understand. The case studies over the decades revealed a bunch of indices of a strong safety culture that the safety culture can be supported by introduction of sharing emotional moments of safety, brief talks, safety voices, toolbox talks (TBT), non-stop integrated awareness (NIA) and ensuring employee well-being. Behavior-based safety – BBS 1.0 is to behaviouralise positive safety culture, more important is BBS 2.0 that refers to the processes of behaviouralisation of positive organizational culture, organizational citizenship behaviours, creating positive organisations, corporate safety values, psychological safety, cultural maturity and so on.