What do Valentina Tereshkova, Shakuntala Bhagat and Sirimavo Bandaranaike have in common?
Any guesses?
In a lighter vein, all three were the first women in the world to beat the men in their own game :-).
Well, these three women are “true” to this year’s theme of IWD 2021 – #ChooseToChallenge. They did choose and achieved remarkable feats that set a trend for many women to follow. While Valentina was the first woman to fly solo in space, Shakuntala Bhagat graduated as the first woman civil engineer in India, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the first woman Prime Minister in the world.
This International Women’s day, Safetymint is proud to be associated with women in the realm of Safety, Sustainability, Hazard and Risk Management, and Audits. We had a chance to connect with a diverse group of women from across borders and across diverse industry sectors – Pharma, Food, Airlines, Chemicals, FMCG as well as regulatory bodies and a couple of representatives from the Ministry as well.
The changing face of OH&S (also referred to as HSE, EHS or SHE) in recent years have been indeed very encouraging. With increased participation from women taskforce to diversity and inclusion – Safety, Health and Environment initiatives have treaded new frontiers with women leading from the front. According to a recent CNBC report, the number of women hired in the role of an Environment Consultant and Public Policy Specialist rose to 51% and 54% respectively in 2019.
The key challenges with regards to equal opportunity employment, pay parity and bias still remain. But the good news is that these gaps are now being recognized, and organizations have upped the ante by changing their policies. A paradigm shift, indeed.
Geetali Thakur, HSE Head at Deccan Fine Chemicals, Goa, shares with us her story. She was amongst the few privileged to have a leader, very early in her career, who gave the opportunity to work at par with others – whether it meant to be part of business meetings or work on tougher tasks at the shopfloor. Her experience as a HSE Professional has been extremely positive and she is an active advocate about the role of women in safety. Her affirmation at work is – “There are no barriers, except the one in your mind.”
Elsewhere, we hear a different story. A participant who wished to remain anonymous talks about not just pay gaps, but the many barriers to get buy-ins from management. Of course, HSE is a not a traditional domain for women. They are expected to go beyond subject matter expertise and upskill across domains. But that is a blessing in disguise as well. Ritika Agarwal – HSSE Manager at Castrol India believes that people respect you when you have demonstrated tangible changes and shown positive results. When it comes to multi-tasking, women do have an edge over men as they bring to the table the innate strengths of sincerity, empathy and delivering value.
“Let’s not talk about safety. Let’s talk about work.”, is the mantra that Gerda-Marie Adenau – Ambassador for Environmental Protection, Health Management, Safety, and Diversity at Siemens, Germany would like to follow at her workplace. Her advice to fellow women in HSE is – “Never stop learning. Treat obstacles as opportunities for your personal growth.” She would like to be there and lend a helping hand and cross-over all obstacles together as a team.
Safety is the responsibility of everyone. And therefore, it is essential to imbue the sense of “responsibility-and-accountability” among all – including the leadership, EHS managers, workers, contractors, and visitors at your premises.
As Carolyn Smith – Head of Health, Safety and Well-being at VPS Group UK, puts it, “Teamwork, employee-engagement and an inclusive mindset (taking everyone’s input into consideration without bias) are the best ways to ensure that everyone goes home to their families after work.” An organization’s brand equity and values reflect not just in its products or services but also in its workplace and workforce behaviour.
We celebrate the spirit of womanhood. As Vera Dinis – EHS Manager at TE Connectivity Portugal says, “The key challenges that women HSE professionals face in their role are multi-tasking, legal compliance across a range of HSE metrics, and involving and engaging all stakeholders.” Her mantra is – Listen more, Observe and Lead by example!
Virginia Bohorquez, HSE Professional at Avetta and the United Nations, also believes people engagement is the key challenge when it comes to creating an inclusive culture of safety and good health. According to her, perseverance is the key, and the cycle of seeing-doing-teaching needs to be continuous with monitoring and measuring metrics.
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Talking about metrics, do you have Safety Competencies and KPIs
well-defined and documented in your organization?
Share with us your thoughts. We would love to hear from you.
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Trish Kerin is Director at iChemE Safety Centre – a non-profit industry consortium providing thought leadership and expertise in promoting process safety. “Not getting hurt is a basic human right”, she says. So, isn’t it necessary to put in place the necessary checks and balances to ensure an injury-free work-environment?
Let’s just agree that women have an eye-for-detail. And that helps bring in critical value addition to determining process gaps, deviations, non-conformances and bettering the workplace environment for good. We connected with Sathya Prema, Lead Auditor and HSE Professional to concur with this statement, and we believe that women outperform men when it comes to audits. But the job never ends there. The key findings from the Audit and the Recommended Actions needs to be validated and closed at stipulated times. This demands more interaction with cross-functional teams, timely interventions with non-technical staff or contract workers, and to an extent hand-holding them to achieve the desired results.
To address the gaps in engaging employees, especially the swift-changing contract workforce, Sasmita Rani Dash – Head of HSE, WHRS Project at ACC Limited, toys with the idea of VFL – Visible Felt Leadership. A concept that she puts to work and one that demands … a) high-levels of empathy; b) greater degrees of transparency; c) timely rewards and recognition; d) optimal safety training and awareness; and most importantly, e) incorporating Safety KPIs as part of the appraisals.
Safety is of course a No.1 priority. What we also learnt from these enterprising women – is that the very nature of behavioral safety is holistic and all-inclusive. It blends these 5 aspects of an organization in rhythm and harmony.
- The environment in which you operate – both internal and external;
- The cultural roots, values and beliefs of your workforce that you collaborate with;
- The quality of interventions, training and development, nurturing of competencies;
- The discipline of following the processes and protocols;
- The level playing field – where the rules of the game are same for both leaders and workers.
And when they do the above, we believe that the organization has not only built a successful business model but also a sustainable one, for generations to come.
We thank one and all who have participated and shared their voices and views within a short span of time. You have spoken not just for yourself, but for a global community of HSE professionals, including the male allies. We all know that the power of change is in everyone. But what we are seeing is that women are leading that change from the front.
Here’s to a Happy Women’s Day, every day!
About Safetymint
Embracing technology … digitization has broken many barriers and has permeated conventional functions. We see wearable devices to monitor worker health at extreme conditions, Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) bringing sensors that can detect deviations and trigger timely alerts and simplified, user-friendly safety management solutions that are equipping every stakeholder in an organization. The women in HSE today are armed with more power than before and #ChooseToChallenge. At Safetymint, we work on a product roadmap with the vision to not just build smart factories of the future, but also factories that are safe-and-sustainable.
K Pradeep is the Founder and Head of Product Development at Safetymint
