BESAFE's 3rd Annual Conference on "Measurable Impacts of Behavioural Based Safety Implementation in Indian Industry"

BESAFE'S Third Annual Conference on "Measurable Impacts of Behavioural Based Safety Implementation in Indian Industry" was held at the PHD Chamber of Commerce, New Delhi in collaboration with the Indo American Chamber of Commerce and VisionOSH, New Delhi.

The Forum for Behavioural Safety (BESAFE), Mumbai, a non-profit organisation has been spearheading the cause of fostering a safe and healthy work place in Indian industry.

Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) as an application of behavioural science has been widely accepted worldwide as an important tool of building a safety culture in industry, helping in achieving zero accident.

BBS has been successfully implemented in prestigious organisations such as GAIL, HPCL, IOCL, L&T, Vedanta, Tata Projects, Sterlite Power, Pidilite, Hindustan Construction, Afcons, Privi Organics, DCM, Galaxy etc.

 

Addressing the occasion, BBS India, Project Leader, Dr H L Kaila said, "The objective of BESAFE is to focus on ensuring zero unsafe behaviours which in effect would mean zero harm and zero incidence of accidents. This national conference would enable Indian industry to achieve zero harm criterion to save life as well as business. In this conference, the Indian companies that implemented BBS will share the results achieved towards zero harm mission".

Rajam Krishnamurthy, Lead EHS, Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru, Devanahalli said, "focusing on safety measures, we plan to introduce new electrical and tool switches with 1/10th voltage, which is a very new technology innovation in India. This is a safety measure taken so that people can use safe and secure electrical equipment, particularly hand power tools. Kempegowda airport is pioneering several such safety measures."

Indian industry or workplaces would have accidents almost every day as behavioural compliance on an average is 70%. Most of the safety management systems have aimed at controlling unsafe conditions, whereas almost 100% of accidents are triggered by unsafe acts or behaviors. Globally, achieving zero accident at the workplace remains one of the major social and economic areas of concern. Every day, 6,300 people die as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases - more than 2.3 million deaths per year (International Labour Organization, 2013).

"BBS is a Total Employee Engagement approach to ensure a sustainable safe workplace through a safety cultural transformation. This is addressed by the identification of at-risk behaviors and mitigation by simple observation, intervention, interaction, and internalization process with an emphasis on positive reinforcement to usher in the change", said Shankar Rajagopalan, Global Brand Ambassador, BBS, VP Quality, SHE, Sustainability & Business Excellence, Tata Projects.

This Behavioural Based Safety (BBS) conference is an opportunity to understand, benchmark your own Company's safety culture with national and international practices and interactions with corporates. About 200 industry representatives participated to focus on behavioral aspects of safety as per ISO 45001 standards. Organizations that don't consider behavioral aspects of safety are safe only accidentally, as unsafe behaviour is the root cause of all accidents worldwide.

The Forum for Behavioural Safety (Besafe) emphasises that more and more we need to look at new approaches to achieving safe and healthy workplaces. We need to apply the learning from the many years of analyses of accidents and ill health because this will contribute to future prevention strategies and activities. Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) is an approach that the forum believes can be applied successfully; it is gaining more interest across industry sectors globally and has the great advantage of needing the involvement of the individual employee, in addition of course, to employer commitment. It is closely linked to company culture and values and, most importantly, when it works, it is an excellent tool to improve safety performance in the workplace.

The daylong session put the conference deliberations into a realistic perspective towards main theme of this national conference linking past, present and future of safety culture of Indian corporates.