A Behavioural Perspective on Vietnam's Corporate Safety Measures and Nudges in Covid-19

Abstract

Robust enforcement of safety procedures is of critical importance for businesses in Vietnam in their efforts to prepare employees for a return to physical workplaces, especially in a country with only 38.8% of its population fully vaccinated as of late November 2021 (Ritchie et al., 2020). In academic literature, nudges are traditionally believed to enhance compliance to protective measures (Debnath and Bardhan, 2020). The aim of this paper is to test the strength of such theoretical analysis of nudges’ effectiveness by applying it to the context of companies in Vietnam. We performed a survey of 41 companies in various sectors and used regression models to interpret our data. One study found a positive significant relationship between automatic registration, monetary rewards, and percentage of employees vaccinated. In the same study, we found an average increase in vaccine uptake of 27.7% to 45.6% due to vaccination nudges. In our second study, we found no evidence that sanitising nudges encourage employees’ usage of sanitary utensils provided to them. Although our small sample size was a major limitation of this study, our findings put the functionality of nudges into a developing country’s context and analysed socio-economic factors that might have caused our results to differ from prior research. With this study being the first to examine the use of nudges to promote pro-health behaviour in large corporations during COVID-19, future research could delve deeper into the effect of other non-mandatory safety measures on overall workplace health.