An investigation of the factors to ensure workplace health, safety and societal safety culture. A case study Garment sector in Bangladesh.

Bangladeshi garments industry is the world second largest garments industry in the world. Thegrowth rate of the industry is very high. The local economy of Bangladesh is highly dependenton the garments industry. There are lots of garment’s factories which do not follow the healthsafety and social safety procedure properly. Therefore, disaster can happen like TarzanFashions Ltd. Disasters can destroy the whole process of their activities and impact oncorporate reputation negatively. If the reputation goes down, the investor may lose theirinterest to invest so that whole industry will suffer. In this research, the author covers workplacehealth safety with respect to physical, ergonomic, and biological hazards and social safetypractices with respect to psychological hazards. The main aim is to investigate how could wedevelop a culture by managing the critical success factors to ensure workplace health safetyand social safety culture in RMG sector of Bangladesh. The analysed previous relevant studiesdid not give action plan to deal with workplace safety issues and no survey was conducted withemployees of garment factories in Bangladesh to reveal the facts. The studies ignoredleadership, communication, training, and employee engagement factors in developing cultureto implement workplace health safety and social safety practices.First of all, this thesis targeted different range of research gaps. This thesis will help the readersto understand the linkage among the selected factors and workplace health safety as well associal practices so they could better understand the connection among the factors. This thesisalso includes the views of employees, working in garment factories in Bangladesh which arelacking in previous relevant studies. This thesis beneficial for garment factories regardless ofcountry to implement workplace safety practices especially in pandemic situations like Covid In axiology perspective, this research gives value to the human nature in terms of employeesworking in the factories in Bangladesh. Their social safety and health safety were consideredas an important aspect to keep employees or workers motivated to enhance overallperformances. In ontology perspective, this study examined the current social safety and healthsafety practices in the factories by analysing the perception of experienced employees of RMGfactories about an effectiveness and an importance of leadership, training & development,communication, and employee engagement. In epistemology perspective, there was need to gothrough the previous existing studies to find out the factors and significant information todevelop the research background to critically evaluate the role of leadership, training &development, communication, and employee engagement in managing critical success factorsof WS&SS.The author selected pragmatism philosophy for this research. The author chose positivismbecause of survey method to collect primary data as in interpretivism as well as in pragmatism,interview and experiment methods are chosen. The author chose positivism also because nointerpretation will be done in analysis section and the findings will be extracted as it is as perrecipient’s answer. Interpretivism philosophy was selected as a part of pragmatism philosophyunder which, interviews were conducted. In this research, the author chose deductive approachin terms of recommendations and an effective guideline to improve workplace safety and socialpractices in garment factories that will impact on their overall financial and operationalperformances.Primary data was collected through interviews and survey questionnaire for this research.There is no gender discrimination during the survey and the interviews. The total populationfor the survey was 198 whereas 20 for the interviews in which recipients were selected in thefactories working at senior positions, given below. each recipient was the selected from onegarment factory. For interviews, only the experienced employee was contacted, working in thefactory for minimum 2 years at managerial position in the selected garment factory inBangladesh. There are about 5 thousand garment factories in Bangladesh in which only 16factories were targeted in Dhaka city due to the availability and accessibility as the researcherused his personal contacts to gain access to the selected factories.It is concluded from the above analysis that RMG factories must consider all the selected andabove-mentioned factors to develop safety culture where workers understand their duties andpractise the workplace safety policies. In this research, the second aspect that is social safetypractice act as an engine in workplace safety machine whereas leaders play driver role in thewhole situation. The role of leaders is not clearly discussed in the matter of workplace safetyculture as per the gathered literature. RMG factories in Bangladesh are not practicing the healthsafety and social safety practices completely. To prevent injuries at the workplace and to createa safe environment for working, workplace safety should be given a priority. This should beinculcated in a company's culture. Lessons should be learned from the most catastrophicworkplace injuries and by frequent inspection of the workspace for potential safety dangers inequipment and job design.Leaders play a primary role in the development of safety culture, based on several factors andaspects, showed in the proposed model below. RMG factories need an integrated approach ofsafety leadership and transformational leadership. The overall situation of all the factories isnot satisfactory as per the workers and it is clearly indicating that the reasons behind theincidents at the factories other than the building collapse incidents were happened due to theno serious behaviour of the workers as well as the staff. The proposed model below wasdeveloped by integrating and compiling all the factors and aspects. This strategic guidelinewould help the RMG factories to manage workplace safety and social safety practices.