The 4th All-Russian Occupational Safety Week (VNOT) took place in main media center of Sochi from 9 to 13 April 2018. It is held by the initiative of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection according to the Decree of the RF Government.
All-Russian Occupational Safety Week is the unique thematic forum on occupational health and safety, which brings together about 10 thousand practitioners, supervising and executive authorities’ representatives, employers and trade unions, top-management of industrial enterprises, business and state corporations, foreign experts and representatives of international organizations. It allows to review and discuss OHS issues in a comprehensive way, taking into consideration opinion of all the parties.
Key topic of the Week-2018 is ‘Occupational Health and Safety: Achievements and Challenges’. What role should occupational safety have in a system of employees social protection considering emerging economic challenges and changing labour market environment in Russia? What future has occupational safety with digital economy and raising productivity? These and other issues participants discussed during the Strategic plenary session with participation of high-level officials, leading Russian and international OHS experts. One of the key events of the Week-2018 was also the conference of the Ministry of Labour ‘Targeting zero: national strategy on occupational health and safety’. There were presented changes in labour legislation of Russia, which are aimed at preventing industrial incidents and creating economic incentives to save life and health for both employers and employees. Also participants discussed subprogramme ‘Safe Labour’ of the state programme ‘Facilitating employment’, aimed at creating condition to form safe labour culture
Thematic portfolio of the Association ‘National Network of the Global Compact’ includes a partner project with Alliance Consulting (‘ACIG’ Group of Companies) project, which working name is ‘Sustainable internal environment – sustainable company’. The project assumes elaboration of a sustainable internal environment model as a factor of a company’s sustainable development and raising value of its efforts on corporate social responsibility in the context of global agenda; facilitating introducing new means to strengthen business immunity and uncovering non-evident reserves for development and raising sustainability under the unstable external environment and challenges of global economy; development of a formalized finance-psychological model of managing parameters of internal social environment, which allows to forecast interconnection between such indicators and specific financial changes, which reflect business efficiency.
Inga Belayeva, an expert of the UN GC local network, Director of the Department of Organizational Psychology of Alliance Consulting (‘ACIG’ GC), presented a project to the participants of symposium ‘Forming corporate safety culture’, which took place during the VNOT. She described the model of sustainable internal environment as a factor of a company’s sustainable development and raising value of its efforts on corporate social responsibility in the context of global agenda.
‘It is good to see that such a large-scale event paid a lot of attention to the importance of work with internal environment, with psychology of people’, comments Inga Belayeva. ‘Vice-presidents of transnational companies, representative of leading Russian companies and public sector – each and every with its own words and based on its own, sometimes tragic, experience said that until we change patterns and behavior of people, full success from introducing new processes and regulating documents should hardly be expected. Sustainable development is fully determined by an ability of leadership, especially high-level leadership, engage people into a necessity to think of safety as of something natural. I was shocked by the statistics of traumatism and mortality in industry because of very simple things: someone decided that wearing a casque was not necessary, someone ignored a prohibition to cross a barrier. Mortality cases because of not well enough fixed pellets or wet floors are not that seldom. These small things result in unbearable losses for families and for huge costs for companies. In this context we presented our model of sustainable internal environment, which allows to digitalize processes that are not easy to formalize on managing psychology and behavior of people. We presented a theoretical concept of a model, its objectives and contents, spoke on further development projects and also on own experience of projects that are already enforced and that demonstrate clear connection between values of internal culture and business financial results’.
UN Global Compact Local Network in Russia expresses its gratitude to the ‘AETHELON’ Association, organizing the All-Russian Occupational Safety Week – for partnership and for an opportunity to take part in thematic discussion.