Road safety perspectives among employees of a multinational corporation in urban India: local context for global injury prevention

Abstract

In rapidly developing economies, like urban India, where road traffic injury rates are among the world's highest, the corporate workplace offers a non-traditional venue for road safety interventions. In partnership with a major multinational corporation (MNC) with a large Indian workforce, this study aimed to elicit local employee perspectives on road safety to inform a global corporate health platform. The safety attitudes and behaviours of 75 employees were collected through self-report survey and focus groups in the MNC offices in Bangalore and Pune. Analysis of these data uncovered incongruity between employee knowledge of safety strategies and their enacted safety behaviours and identified local preference for interventions and policy-level actions. The methods modelled by this study offer a straightforward approach for eliciting employee perspective for local road safety interventions that fit within a global strategy to improve employee health. Study findings suggest that MNCs can employ a range of strategies to improve the road traffic safety of their employees in settings like urban India including: implementing corporate traffic safety policy, making local infrastructure changes to improve road and traffic conditions, advocating for road safety with government partners and providing employees with education and access to safety equipment and safe transportation options.

Keywords:

• Injury prevention
• road traffic environment
• road safety
• India
• corporate social responsibility

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the generous participation of the health programme leadership and MNC employees in India without whom this research would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

National Science Foundation (NSF) [grant number 1243422]; NSF Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies; National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) [grant number F31NR0113599]. The content of this research is solely the responsibility of the the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health.