Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry (2016) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 138-170
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138 This chapter examines how safety culture is typically assessed, as well as how it should be measured in the offshore oil and gas industry. It begins by restating the definition of safety culture used in this report (see Chapter 2)
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 139 of the organizational culture that pertain to safety, including values, beliefs, assumptions, norms, and practices. Given the complexity of the offshore oil and gas industry, the safety culture concept extends to both companies of various sizes (including business units, divisions, and departments that act like organized entities)
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140 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry ASSESSING AND MANAGING SAFETY CULTURE The management systems in an organization direct attention toward strategic goals and priorities, one of which is safety. The organization's culture needs to be aligned with and help support and reinforce the management systems, and safety culture is no exception.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 141 Consideration of these reasons suggests different criteria for choosing an assessment approach, such as whether to select a widely accepted tool or to develop one tailored to the organization, or whether to assess safety culture more narrowly or organizational culture more broadly. Among the reasons listed above, this chapter assumes the pragmatic goal of assessing safety culture to improve safety.
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142 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry (or concerns about work and managerial practices that are not speci fied as related to safety)
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 143 matic. This section briefly examines culture assessment in general and then turns to safety culture assessment in particular, considering both the content and process of the assessment.
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144 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry heard, including visible artifacts and communicated values and beliefs, whereas the essence of culture, comprising underlying assumptions, is "deeper" and difficult even for cultural insiders to perceive and articulate. How Safety Culture Can Be Assessed To assess safety culture, one must start with a clear concept and then build a set of assessment procedures suited to that concept.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 145 Note three issues with respect to this figure. First, proponents of various methods would differ dramatically on where the methods should be placed on the figure, especially in terms of accuracy (scientific validity)
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146 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry "masculine" culture in which accidents and injuries were frequent and little learning took place to a more "feminine" culture that reshaped "gender identity" to focus on learning and safety. Although it is debatable how accurate ethnographic approaches can be (e.g., most people want to present a positive impression, and replication is unusual and sometimes has been disappointing when attempted)
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 147 misses, and operational refinement. First, documents in the form of reports of inquiries or government investigations into an accident can serve as a source of vicarious learning for other organizations through out the industry (March et al.
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148 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry proceduralized so they can be dealt with reliably by all departments. The negotiation process also creates norms of interdependence and collabo ration, reduces mindless execution of tasks, and tends to curb "hubris and bullheadedness" among organizational members.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 149 assessment ("our scores are good enough") as opposed to a mechanism to guide a substantive conversation about safety (Schein 2013)
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150 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry injuries) rather than failures of process safety, with some exceptions (e.g., Hofmann and Mark 2006)
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 151 A method that is not as time and laborintensive as ethnography but not as broadbrush or "distant" as surveys is a process that can be called guided self-analysis. This method relies primarily on cultural insiders to analyze their own culture through one or more workshops or meetings (hence, selfanalysis)
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152 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry pared to discuss them, the next step is to explore the contradictions -- for example, to ask, "Why do we say we value safety but we seem to take actions that value production over safety? " It may be that there are deeper understandings of safety and production that resolve the contradiction in a way that helps in understanding the culture.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 153 be useful to think about the organization's strengths and attempt to learn from its successes. It is essential for interpretation of the mean ing of the scores to go beyond numerical averages or the intuitions of a few people preparing the survey report.
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154 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry walkarounds, observations of prejob briefings and afteraction reviews, and union concerns. Some of these indicators may be quantitative, others a simple greenyellowred assessment, and still others qualita tive comments.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 155 comparisons and industrylevel sharing with other organizations using the same tools. However, existing tools have the disadvantages of being generic and therefore less useful in terms of the specific issues and context of an organization; such tools also may instill less sense of ownership of safety culture.
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156 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry ing ownership of the assessment process will increase its engagement in and commitment to the process and any resulting recommended changes. Third, assessments that are conducted and evaluated closer to the organization's work processes typically result in more timely feed back and therefore greater flexibility and learning.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 157 may be hesitant to participate in safety culture assessments because their opinion has not often been valued: "Workers generally know where many of the safety problems are, but since no one asks them their opinion, they resist getting involved in the safety program." In addi tion, workers may fear that making reports of safety issues or negative comments could jeopardize their job, create conflict in the workplace, increase workload for themselves or their coworkers, and fail to result in improvements. Companies need to build trust in management and provide positive incentives to encourage reporting and participation in the learning process (e.g., Baram 1997)
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158 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Frontline employees and all key stakeholders also need to stay involved, or at least be informed on an ongoing basis, once the safety culture assessment has been completed. Many organizations fail to communicate the results of the selfassessment back to employees, who are likely to conclude that the assessment was a ceremonial exercise carried out to comply with external demands and that no meaning ful changes will result.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 159 At the same time, the process of assessment raises expectations of improvement, and unless visible change is communicated to the work force (change in which they ideally have been actively engaged) , the process will likely increase cynicism and further entrench the existing culture.
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160 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry perform this role. For example, the U.K.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 161 and both quantitative and qualitative indicators of safety culture. Companies should also apply a mix of indicators, including some that are more standard across the industry to facilitate ease of use and comparison across organizations and some that are tailored to the specific needs and concerns of their organization.
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162 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Recommendation 5.1.5: As a complement to Recommendations 5.1.3 and 5.1.4, the offshore industry should work collectively on the challenges of strengthening safety culture. BSEE should support this effort by serving as a clearinghouse for and facilitator of industrylevel exchanges of lessons learned and benchmarking, thereby helping the industry develop a shared language, shared approaches, appropriate options, and more practical and efficient assessment practices.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 163 The safety culture assessment process is itself a cultural intervention. The process can reinforce a reactive and cynical culture or help the organization move toward a proactive and generative culture.
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164 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Recommendation 5.4.1: Safety culture assessments should be designed and analyzed to capture variation within the organization, including by hierarchical level, work location or department, and employer. Thus the assessment should collect a broad set of indicators from a suitably diverse set of individuals and groups.
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 165 national legal systems, in enabling or preventing improvements in safety culture? • Can safety cultures be grouped into discernible models or types, such as those described by Westrum (2004; see Chapter 2)
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166 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Branch, K
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 167 Immobilization Plant. http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/hss/Enforcement%20 and%20Oversight/Oversight/docs/reports/semevals/Final_Hanford_WTP Report_Jan%202012.pdf.
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168 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Hofstede, G
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Safety Culture Assessment and Measurement 169 Ron, N., R Lipshitz, and M
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170 Strengthening the Safety Culture of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Weick, K
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