(8a) OK, so Our Culture Sucks! What Do We Do Now?

Culture is an organization’s “behind the scenes” operating environment.  Organizational culture is the sum total of values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes and behaviors shared by an organization.  As such, culture tends to be the result of everything that happened or failed to happen.  The quality of an organization’s leadership and their commitment will drive or limit the culture.

Some essential features of a sound safety cultureare:

• Enforcement of high standards, i.e. avoidance of normalization of deviance
• Maintenance of a sense of vulnerability
• Open and effective communication
• Timely response to safety issues / concerns

Management commitment is the cornerstone to a positive safety culture – both occupational safety and process safety.  Management must care and explicitlyshow that they care in order to begin to establish the roots of a similar commitment embedded in the culture throughout the workforce.

Unfortunately, process safety management systems have not been fully successful in some organizations because of poor safety cultures, often as a result of, or influenced by, inadequate senior management commitment.  Changes to improve systems are relatively easy to implement.  A little training and away we go!  However, without spending the time and effort with the employees affected by the change, helping them understand why there needs to be a change, the changes are unlikely to be successful or sustainable.  Dealing with people’s emotions and engrained work habits is difficult.  The first consideration is to understand and address the requirements for change in the organization’s culture.

Can culture’s impact on the organization be measured?  Can organizational culture be altered and/or changed? The answer is yes in both instances, but entails considerable work from senior executives, line managers, and shop floor supervisors in order to sustain the change.

This paper will present several key steps involving:

• Sponsorship
• Providing project leadership
• Undergoing the rigors of change management
• Investing in grounding the organization
• Mentoring the activities of employees through the change transition
• Building sustainment – the “buy-in” and measuring the results

These steps should be followed to change safety cultures in order to assure that corporate values (operational integrity) are shared at every level of the organization so that values are linked to behavior to improve process safety performance for alignment with CCPS's Vision 2020.  Implementation of these steps will be illustrated by a case study involving improvements in hazard identification and reporting at multiple production sites.