Benchmarking Safety Culture on the UKCS
Authors: Mearns Kathryn , Thom Gordon 
Published: December 2007

The UK offshore oil and gas industry has made considerable progress in improving safety through hardware, systems and procedural approaches. Accident rates have now plateaued and the industry has identified that in order to make further improvements, it needs to understand the behavioural and cultural aspects of safety. This paper describes how 13 offshore oil and gas companies and the UK HSE have been working together to;Understand what constitutes UK offshore safety culture;Develop a technique for systematically measuring it;Understand the relationship between cultural aspects and good safety performance,Promote learning and growth through the sharing of ‘best practice’.

In order to achieve these objectives, safety culture is being ‘benchmarked’ from four perspectives using a Balanced Scorecard approach;Workforce opinions about safety;Safety management process;Costs of safety (loss costing and safety investment);Learning and Growth - ‘Best practice’ emerging from the other perspectives.

Leading indicators have been developed to measure these perspectives in the form of questionnaires. The benchmarking exercise allows organisations (offshore installations) to compare their performance. On the basis of these results a ‘best in class’ is identified and analysis of the safety management process identifies practices that lead to a ‘safe’ and ‘satisfied’ workforce and low accident/incident rates. These practices can then be shared across the participating organisations. Relationships between results from workforce opinions about safety; safety management processes and accidents/incidents are also outlined.

Introduction

Traditionally, the ‘state of safety’ within organisations has been measured in terms of ‘lagging indicators’ such as accidents and incidents. However recently, organisations have been turning their attention to the measurement of so-called ‘leading indicators’ of safety, in the anticipation that they could detect emerging safety problems before they are realised as accidents and incidents. Blackmore1 states that these leading types of performance indicator are inputs which relate to higher management mechanisms such as leadership, monitoring and auditing and that ‘Their purpose has as much to do with promoting a positive safety culture as controlling risk.’ (p.1). If this is the case, then which leading indicators are important for promoting a positive ‘safety culture’? The UK offshore oil and gas industry has become increasingly interested in the concept of ‘safety culture’ due mainly to the report on the Inquiry into the Piper Alpha disaster2. Cullen recognised that the quality of safety management is critical to offshore safety and he therefore made it a component in the regulatory regime.

The importance of safety management in the promotion of a positive safety culture was also identified by INSAG3 who claim that safety culture has two general components;The necessary framework within the organization which is the responsibility of the management hierarchyThe attitude of staff at all levels in responding to and benefiting from the framework

There are currently many different survey instruments available claiming to measure safety climate or culture4, 5, 6, 7. These instruments have been designed to measure the attitudes, values and beliefs of staff with respect to safety within their particular organisation. However, this approach appears to miss out an important element of safety culture, namely some measurement of the norms and rules to which the workforce are responding.