Safety in workplace was first followed as a part of legal compliances with minimum effort, focusing more on production and profits. In the recent years, since the companies have started focusing on human resource as a valuable part of the overall functioning, companies have started integrating safety within the culture. While safety culture is a very vague term, we tried to answer how do professionals working in the organization measure the safety culture and how are their perceptions linked with different duties that management performs.

Professionals tend to measure their organizations safety culture on the kind of support they receive from their management with 56% respondents taking management support as the biggest parameter of safety culture in the organization. Many of the respondents (23%) related their safety culture directly with the number of accidents/incidents or trainings happening in their organization. EHS representation in board was the second lowest with 15% which makes us think how much does the EHS representation in the boardroom actually mean to the professionals working in the EHS departments and the budget received was the lowest in the list with only 6% respondents relating safety culture with EHS budget.

Support for initiative from management for day to day safety related activities, initiatives for new programs and campaigns, support in terms of approvals, man power, participation, etc. had a much deeper impact than giving a position in boardroom or giving higher budget for EHS.

Manhours spent on safety related activities for non EHS personnel:

EHS Department routinely sets up training for safety related activities which have to be attended by every one. But the perception of entry level employees and senior management differs when it comes to the amount of non-EHS professional spend on safety related activities. Whereas the senior management has a optimistic perception with more than 70% professionals responding that the non EH5 staff spends more than 50 man hours for safety related activities, the same perception was different for entry level EHS personnel. Almost half of entry level employees say that the amount of time a non EHS person spends for safety related activities is less than 50 hours a year. This difference of opinion may be a result of unawareness of entry level employees, but most likely can be a result of difference between planned activities by senior management and actual activities that happened in real life scenario.

The perception of senior management on the amount of hours all non EHS personnel spend on safety is higher than what the entry level thinks are the number of hours spent by non EHS personnel a year on safety activities. This may be the difference between the planned trainings and the trainings actually not happening due to multiple reasons such as cancellation, people not attending , production targets & culture.

Cultural impacts have far more reaching consequences. It impacts the way a person working in the organization thinks about himself/herself. The analysis between the perception that employees will reach a much higher position in their career and how their organization treats them gives us a better picture.

How organizations can build confidence among their employees:

Organizations that are more receptive of their employee’s ideas inspire more confidence where the employees feel they can advance their career at a much higher pace. Out of the 46% respondents who answered that their organizations were very receptive of their ideas, 65% professionals felt they would reach high positions but when we compare the same with professionals who answered that their ideas were only heard few times, the number of professionals who believe they will reach at higher positions decreases to 35%.

Organizations who support ideas from their employees, implement them give boosts to the employees and incentivize them to think beyond the box, making them more confident about their job and accelerate their career growth.

While the organizations are actively making efforts to add gender diversity in their organizations, EHS is still a long way behind. Women admissions have increased in Engineering & safety courses which point out to the changes in the coming times with the ratio for gender diversity improving soon.

Increasing amount of data, CAPA, regulations and organization’s own desire to become better than what they are today has resulted in continuous updating of SOPs and making sure nothing is left to chance.

Assessment

Road safety is another growing concern for organizations, especially when they have a lot of road travel included due to distance involved between factories & residential places. A lot of these organizations providing transportation have their own road safety officers (42.8%) who ensure that the correct guidelines are being followed. With digital systems in place, (19%) organizations are able to monitor and track their vehicle movements inside & outside their premises. A good chunk of organizations also rely on penalty structure & road safety rules (38.1%). Relying on penalty structure ensures the compliance of the workers but works only as long as there is strict enforcement of penalties

Road safety for Non Factory Workers

While the organizations are taking an interest for measuring road safety, it is still in the initial stages and not all factory workers are covered. There are a lot of non factory staff working on the field who are barely covered. On asking about the same, respondents from different organization responded that only 33.33% organizations had their non factory workers covered in road safety while 47.6% did not have any such ability, 4.7% were developing their strategy for the same & 14.29% measured it but had no KPI’s defined for the same.

Safety Strategy focused on road safety

43% respondents from senior management said their safety strategy consisted of more than 15% when it came to road safety with 19% responding it was between 10- 15% and another 19% responding it was around 5-10% of their overall safety strategy. Remaining had less than 59é focus on road safety or none at all. In the coming years, this numbers will change significantly as more and more organizations are focusing on their employee’s safety on the roads.

Organizations are focusing more on road safety with more than 5-15% of their safety strategy revolving around road safety. With 40% organizations having dedicated road safety officers who take care of all the incident investigations, SOP update, rules & implementation of penalty based systems, etc. Being relatively new in adaption by organizations, there are no strict KPIs for majority of the organizations when it comes to road safety but more and more organizations are planning to implement it.

Majority of Indian SMEs & industries are in varying stages of industry 2.0 and 3.0. Indian Industries need to adapt, accept new technologies and improve their productivity to compete with the competiton from around the globe

70 % organizations lack specialized software for daily operations and are stuck with generally used tools like emails, excels, etc which are very basic in nature.

‹5 %  Use of AI based tools in the industry in current time

 

Safety is generally rated higher when compared to Environment & Health in EHS with most organizations allocating higher budgets to safety.

Reliability:

Talking about the Reliability as a function of EHS KPI, maximum respondents (68%) said that their organization did not consider it as a function of EHS KPI, that they haven’t planned it or still planning and need more knowledge. 32% organizations of the participants saw reliability as a function of EHS KPI which shows the organizations have started thinking about the seriousness with which they are treating their EHS work above and beyond the legal compliances but still have a substantial way ahead with market leaders taking the lead in having EHS as a major part of the organization framework

Maximum respondents (48%) believed that Behavior based safety was implemented in their organization due to very low involvement of workers when it came to safety. The organizations used trainings, reward systems to increase the involvement of workers and make safety as a part of the overall culture. 33% mentioned it was implemented due to various non repetitive issues where safety could be improved only if it comes from the workers themselves. 16% also mentioned about increasing accident rate which led to the implementation of BBS to better educate the workers about safety at workplaces. The perception of 3% respondents was that it had nothing to do with the above mentioned points and their organization just implemented it because others were doing it.

LOTO – Lock out tag out

LOTO systems are generally designed to be very robust and failure free, but due to human error, accidents have happened in the past. When we asked about the ratings that the respondents would like to give to their established LOTO procedures, 66.2% gave a rating above 8 out of the total 10, 27% gave between 4-7 and only 6.5% respondents thought their organization had much more scope to improve when it came to LOTO

CAPA is done to improve & mitigate chances of incidents or shut downs happening by identifying the problems and taking corrective or preventive actions before the fault becomes serious. High level of accuracy results in a better CAPA management. On asking the respondents about the accuracy of their CAPA management systems, we found that less than 50% respondents could say that their CAPA findings are matching with the actual results and on paper without any kind of repetition observed. Rest of the respondents had experienced issues related to repetition, non alignment of results or both.

While organizations focus a lot on systems like LOTO, which can have serious consequences if not followed, the same cannot be said for processes that help in improving the efficiency and mitigating risks. It shows the mentality of the organizations about reactive safety & preventive safety, meaning they focus only on high risk, immediate factors rather than have a long term plan.

On asking the senior management EHS leaders about having a process safety management program active in the organization, only 60% professionals responded yes. The rest of the organizations did not have any such program or were still in the planning stage.

From managing everything on paper, the companies are slowing moving towards using digital tools. Although this transition is coming, its still slow and not even remotely near the standards set by western countries. The implementation of various different tools were as follows when the upper management respondents were asked which tools they used to manage PSI.

While majority of the respondents, 41% were using commonly used digital mediums such as excel, mails, pdfs, etc. a lot of professionals (29%) said they did not keep information on a common server and kept it within defined teams only. It was interesting to know that a lot of companies have now started using more sophisticated methods of collecting and storing data with 12% using custom software and 18% using digital twin interface software.

Process safety has in general been given higher importance due to the catastrophic consequences of PSM failure. Process safety can be improved on a large scale via usage of data analytics and data collection in real time. Use of digital mediums are rapidly increasing with more custom built software & real time data with digital twin interface. While there are still organizations not utilizing the full potential of data, those numbers are bound to decrease

While only half (51%) EHS professionals thought their organization was serious or even partially serious about sustainability with only 11% taking a positively strong stance on their organizations sustainable practices while 33% preferred to remain neutral and 16% accepted that their organization was not into sustainability with much effort. These figures reveal the extent of the organizations contribution towards sustainability. To achieve a balance between profits and sustainability, organizations as whole will have to think beyond productions & profit,- for future

In today’s times, sustainability is not only required for the purpose of legal requirements. Sustainability has become a core part of Corporate social governance as well as for public relations. Organizations not following sustainable means for productions are looked down upon and slowly get affected on their business revenues as people in general are more aware than before, and believe that they can do their bit in saving the environment by supporting organizations who themselves are using sustainable means of production.

Though organizations have started following reporting standards, their general mindset towards sustainability remains below par compared to organizations from the western countries. Using sustainable means for productions is not cheap, but have long term benefits. Sadly, less than 52% EHS professionals believe that their organizations is not taking sustainability very seriously.

While 91% respondents said that they have a reporting mechanism in place, 83% out of the given 91% organization had an internal reporting mechanism for sustainability. Among those 83%, GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) appeared to be the most prominent with over 31.42% organizations using it. Surprisingly, 34% of the organizations reporting internally did not follow any of the major reporting standards such as GRI, CDP, IIRC or SASB, giving a different approach towards reporting or just logging it for compliance purposes.

We also asked professionals which standard they found more relevant and practical when it came to Indian scenario. A whopping 44% selected GRI as the best practical reporting mechanism IIRC(Incident Investigation & Reporting Committee being the second most popular with 18% votes.

GRI (Global reporting index) appeared to be the most popular for organizations with over

31.4% organizations using it, while 44% EHS professionals believe that GRI is more suitable in Indian

48% respondents believed their organization was working very well in plastic waste management and gave above 8 ratings out of 11 to their organizations efforts. 44% respondents thought their organizations were giving adequate efforts but things could be improved much more and gave them ratings between 5 to 7 out to 11. Only 8 % professionals felt their organization was poor in terms of plastic waste management & needed a lot of work to improve.

With all majority of the companies situated out side of water scarce zone, there is a perception that companies don’t care about their surrounding air and water resources. When asked to the respondents about the same, it came as a surprise to see the data with 68% participating EHS personnel giving a good rating between 8 to 11 out of 11 to their organizations for their water management processes, while 29% gave a rating of 4-7 and only 3% felt the efforts their organization was putting in was wholly inadequate. This shows the seriousness of the organizations towards water management and compliance to state and national laws being followed strictly.

Organizations have started working on plastic wastage & water management but according to the entry level staff who are on the ground most of the day, the efforts towards water management are rated much higher as compared to the efforts by the organizations on plastic waste management.

For GHG measurements, out of the total middle management respondents, 59% did not have sensors in place and the whole recording took place manually. While the 41% respondents had sensors, only 26% had the technology to go with the sensors in place, rest 15% are still depended on manual logging.

Organizations of the 50% Professionals from the middle management who were actively recording GHG emissions, said that their prime focus was on CO2 (61.4%) with the others being secondary concerns according to the type of the industry.

There are too many types of emissions the companies need to focus depending on their production and material handling, but there is significant seriousness only for carbon dioxide emissions which are in focus these days due to Global warming and media outrage. This is again a part of reactive approach and not proactive approach to mitigate risks before they happen. Only 50a» organizations recorded GHG emissions out of the total respondents.

56% of the respondents mentioned that their organization’s ESG goals were aligned with the Paris agreement. majority of the organizations, 70%, have set their goals for 2030 and they remain unaffected by the current pandemic. while 2.7% organization had set goals for 2030, but due to the pandemic they are planning to postpone their deadlines. 26.1% organizations have not set their goals for ESG but out of them, 15.6% organizations are planning to set goals soon, while the rest have no immediate plan to do so.

Focus in next 10 years

30 to 35% organizations are focusing on the target of having at least 10 – 20% reduction in Energy consumption & GHG emission. As evident by the chart, most of the organization follow a similar pattern for both Energy reduction as well as GHG emissions, with a slight more focus on energy reduction in the 10 – 20% goal set bracket.

Organizations are focusing on both, energy consumption reduction and GHG reduction with both targets going hand in hand for almost all the organizations except few who are more focused on reducing energy consumption compared to GHG emissions. This may be due to multiple  organizations  going  with  green  building  designs,  power  efficient  lighting  & application of renewable energy to reduce their net energy consumption from conventional