Process Safety Leadership and Culture - How to Measure and Ensure Improvement

Process safety leadership and culture are recognized as key factors for effective process safety management implementation. Inspite of this, major accident investigations continue find these lapses as significant contributors.  Leadership and process safety culture assessment and improvement in a multi-cultural environment is particularly difficult.  This paper will address a method for baseline evaluation of culture/leadership and ongoing near-real-time measurement of improvement based upon the CCPS essential features of a good process safety culture as published in Gudeilines for Risk Based Process Safety.

• Process safety must be a core value
• Strong leadership
• Accountability to performance standards
• Formal safety culture approach
• Good sense of vulnerability
• Employee empowerment
• Deference to expertise
• Effective communicatons
• Safe questioning/learning environment
• Mutual trust
• Responsiveness to safety issues
• Continuous improvement

The presentation will give examples from several culture evaluations and will discuss ways to address culture, leadership and operating discipline and real-life examples.