Many have recognized the importance of organizational culture in major accident prevention. As a result, companies have undertaken long-term efforts to assess, improve and maintain a good process safety/HSE culture. This paper will summarize lessons from 40+ safety culture improvement initiatives addressing results from:
39 studies to assess culture using several measurement frameworks and tools
15 programs to use the results for culture assessments to improve the process safety DNA in various organizational layers from executives to first line supervisors to contractors
7 efforts to measure culture improvement over a multiple-year period
In addition, this paper will address some especially challenging issues faced by companies wanting to improve process safety culture:
Improving contractor culture
Addressing multi-ethnic workforces
Increasing process safety ownership across a site
Near real-time measurement of culture
Equipping everyone to be Culture Agent
We will highlight a few cases where the improvement in culture has been tied to improvement in process safety metrics as well as overall safety performance.
