Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 34, Issues 1–3, February 2000, Pages 111-129
Safety Science

Assessing safety culture in offshore environments

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0925-7535(00)00009-6Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper discusses a joint industry and UK Health and Safety Executive research project on the assessment of safety culture in offshore environments. It particularly describes the development of a safety culture assessment methodology which is based on a systems approach to organisational culture. This approach combines a number of assessment methods, such as: questionnaires, focus groups, behavioural observations and situational audits, to describe and explore the efficacy of health and safety management systems. The evidence produced by these methods are complementary rather than alternatives and provide different views of organisational health and safety culture by tapping many aspects of the organisation's structure, function and behaviour. The assessment techniques have been piloted within collaborating organisations, both within the UK and the Gulf of Mexico. The culmination of the work is the “Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit” which is now published and available for use by managers and safety professionals within the offshore oil extraction industry.

Introduction

In the decade following the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster many of the offshore oil and gas processing organisations within the UK have made changes in the manner in which they manage health and safety (Alexander et al., 1994, Flin et al., 1996, Cox and Cheyne, 1999). The majority of these changes were precipitated by developments in the offshore health and safety regulatory regime following on from the recommendations of the Cullen Report (Cullen, 1990), including, for example, the establishment of the Offshore Safety Division of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the application of the Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations (1992). In the wake of such changes, a Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum has been established to facilitate the sharing of safe working practices. The members of this forum recently highlighted a number of indicators of improved safety performance (Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum, 1997), including an overall decrease in reported injury frequency rates and an estimated $5 billion in investments in health and safety-related improvements. However, despite these overall efforts, there is some evidence to suggest that the rate of improvement, as measured by accident/injury frequency, has slowed down over the past 2 years (HSE, 1997, Cox and Cheyne, 1999). Furthermore the Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum (1997) have also confirmed that much of the existing efforts in support of these improvements have been focused upon technology and management systems rather than human factors. They also suggest that potential for future improvements may best be realised through enhanced efforts in the areas of human factors and through the associated developments in health and safety culture. In light of this initiative this paper considers how offshore installation managers can gauge their safety culture. Discussion here focuses on the development of a generic safety culture assessment methodology which was designed to support improvements in safety performance across the sector.

This paper describes a series of studies that are focused on the practical needs of offshore managers and workers for the monitoring of safety culture through the development of a self-assessment tool. It aims to give a broad overview of the development of this methodology (Cox and Cheyne, 1999) and draws heavily upon recent work carried out in the UK sector of the North Sea. It also explores the practical utility of the concept in offshore environments. The methods described here are concerned with both the development and piloting of this tool. Whereas the methodology is based on sound safety science, the overall aim of the assessment process is to chart a path through, what is increasingly becoming, a conceptual minefield (Cox and Flin, 1998), and one in which researchers have been challenged by industry to address practical issues (Cox and Lacey, 1998). Although much has been done in other sectors (e.g. Hale and Hovden, 1998, Hofmann and Stetzer, 1998) in these studies the cultural context for investigation is set within the offshore industry.

A number of previous studies in offshore environments have, either directly or indirectly, considered employee perceptions and elements of health and safety culture. In an early study, Marek et al. (1985) examined risk perceptions, stress and accidents among different work groups on an offshore installation. They identified the main influences on safety as the implementation of a safety policy, ‘correct’ safety management and safety promoting activities, and incorporation of employees' views in designing safety programmes. Similarly Rundmo (1993) implemented a questionnaire survey of personnel on eight offshore installations in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea; firstly to determine the personnel evaluations of risk resources and, secondly, to identify differences in risk perceptions among different work groups. These studies indicated that those personnel who were most prone to injuries and near misses were also those who experienced the greatest physical strain and who perceived the highest risks in relation to their work situation (Rundmo, 1993). Flin and Mearns (1994) carried this work forward into the UK sector of the North Sea. They identified three important areas which could contribute to accidents and near misses: (1) individual characteristics (including experience, knowledge, attitudes to safety, etc); (2) job characteristics (work tasks, environment, job stress, etc.); and (3) platform characteristics (safety culture, social support and safety management systems). This study (Flin and Mearns, 1994) also indicated that management commitment to safety, job satisfaction, attitudes to safety versus production and job situation had the greatest effect on workers' perception of risk and their satisfaction with safety measures.

In a study focussing specifically on safety culture, Alexander et al. (1994) used self-administered questionnaires and supporting interviews in an attempt to measure aspects of safety culture in the offshore environment within one operating company in the UK sector of the North Sea. The study also focussed on differences in perceptions of the prevailing culture between company employees and contractors and those working in onshore and offshore environments. The culture for safety within the operating company was described, in terms of employees' attitudes and perceptions, by six factors, labelled as management commitment, personal need for safety, appreciation of risk, attribution of blame, conflict and control and supportive environment. Contractor employees were found to have a higher appreciation of risk and a higher personal need for safety compared with the operating company employees. Similarly, offshore workers in general had a higher appreciation of risk, greater personal need for safety and were more convinced of management's commitment to safety than those working onshore. Mearns et al. (1998) have continued this focus on human and organisational issues in their study of safety climate in the UK sector of the North Sea. Their study, based on a questionnaire survey of employee attitudes, provided evidence that sub-cultures, centred around, for example, work teams or parent organisations, are important for workers' perceptions of their overall safety.

There are, thus, a number of dominant themes in relation to human factors and, in particular, safety culture emerging from these offshore studies and other reported studies in the literature (Cox and Flin, 1998). For example, the importance of management commitment and, in particular, the perceived priority accorded to safety matters, has been repeatedly highlighted. Equally a number of studies (e.g. Flin et al., 1996) have confirmed the need to consider not only key organisational factors, but also to take account of individual factors, such as personal appreciation of risks and involvement in safety-related decisions, as key influences on safety performance, and the related safety culture, within offshore environments. Similarly, potential sub-cultures, characteristic of different occupational groups, and the concomitant influences on overall installation, or organisational, culture have been identified. As a consequence of these studies, and recent discussions and conferences within the offshore environment (Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum, 1997, Cox and Lacey, 1998), the awareness and development of an ‘appropriate’ safety culture is now seen to be an important area of concern with managers, regulators and researchers. It has also been argued by researchers into offshore health and safety management practices that the safety culture concept has the potential to provide an umbrella for both individual and organisational safety issues (Cox and Flin, 1998) and can be used as a vehicle for framing further improvements. However, although there is indeed some evidence to suggest that assessing the prevailing organisational culture can assist in the identification and management of health and safety issues (Cox and Flin, 1998), the practical utility of the safety culture concept in securing safety-related improvements in offshore environments has not yet been established (Lee, 1995).

The present studies are concerned with the development and testing of an assessment technique which provides both a practical tool for the assessment of safety climate and simultaneously aids the promotion of a ‘positive’ safety culture. The studies described here are published in the “Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit” (Cox and Cheyne, 1999) together with a guide for those using the toolkit. In view of the practical intentions of the studies and the nature of the output, potential toolkit users in participating organisations were widely consulted in the development of the conceptual framework. This framework has been described in a number of previous publications (e.g. Cheyne et al., 1988, Cox et al., 1998, Cox and Cheyne, 1999) and involves a holistic view of safety climate assessment. Assessments of safety climate are used here as an indicator of overall safety culture. Culture in general, and safety culture in particular, is often characterised as an enduring aspect of the organisation with trait-like properties and not easily changed. Climate, on the other hand, can be conceived of as a manifestation of organisational culture (Schein, 1985) exhibiting more state-like properties. The nature of culture and climate and their relationship has also been related to the concepts of personality and mood (Cox and Flin, 1998), where culture represents the more trait-like properties of personality and climate the more state-like properties of mood. For the purposes of this discussion climate is viewed as a temporal manifestation of culture, which is reflected in the shared perceptions of the organisation at a discrete point in time (Cox and Cheyne, 1999).

A multiple perspective, or holistic, model of the safety climate assessment process was proposed and, as such, dominated the project design. Similar approaches are discussed within the literature in relation to the assessment of organisational climate (James and Jones, 1974, Cox and Cox, 1996, Denison, 1996). It has been suggested (Jick, 1979) that organisational researchers and practitioners can improve the accuracy of their judgements by both utilising multiple methods and collecting different kinds of data bearing on the same phenomenon, in this case safety climate. ‘Between (or across) methods’ triangulation (Denzin, 1978) offers such an approach. Jick (1979) cites the example of reviewing the effectiveness of an organisational ‘leader’, where effectiveness may be studied by: (1) interviewing the leader; (2) observing their leadership behaviours; and (3) evaluating performance records. The focus remains with the organisational issue (in Jick's, 1979 example ‘leadership’) but the mode of data collection varies. Multiple and independent measures, if they provide supportive evidence, can thus provide a more certain picture (or profile) of the issue under review (Denzin, 1978, Cox and Cheyne, 1999).

In the same vein James and Jones (1974) describe three different approaches to the assessment of organisational culture (and climate) and, in doing so, offer commentary on its different (conceptual) loci. First, is the ‘multiple measurement-organisational attribute approach’ which regards organisational climate exclusively as a set of organisational attributes (or main effects), measurable by a variety of methods; e.g. organisational structure or organisational systems measured by propriety audit systems. Second, there is the ‘perceptual-organisational attribute approach’, which views organisational climate as a set of perceptual variables which are still seen as organisational effects, e.g. views of the organisation's commitment, etc. Finally, there is the ‘perceptual measurement-individual attribute approach’ which captures organisational climate through perceptions of individual attributes, e.g. individuals' feelings and attitudes towards organisational issues, their related behaviour, etc. Given the importance of both organisational and individual factors in influencing safety culture (James and Jones, 1974, Denison, 1996) it is suggested that in an attempt to measure culture these different approaches should be treated as complementary and not as alternatives. Thus a multiple perspective was taken which also combined different approaches to assessment, as recommended by Jick (1979). This is illustrated in the framework model shown in Fig. 1.

In such a model, the representation of organisational safety culture is consistent with one sponsor's preferred (HSE, 1997) definition. For example, the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations' (ACSNI) (Booth, 1996, ACSNI, 1993) definition, that safety culture is “the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation's health and safety management” (ASCNI, 1993, p. 23), is consistent with the representation in the model. A similar approach has been taken in the assessment of safety culture in the nuclear industry (Carroll, 1998) where aspects of the organisation derived through peer observations and audit were considered alongside questionnaires. The data were then used in ongoing discussions to further organisational learning.

The three methods proposed for use in a safety climate assessment exercise, and illustrated in Fig. 1, form the basis of the assessment methods included in the Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit. The toolkit is a practical instrument for in-house use and it contains a selection of tools that can be used as part of the measurement process. These tools include questionnaires, interview and focus discussion group schedules and behavioural indicators. A full text and electronic version of the toolkit can be found at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/bs/safety

The remainder of this paper discusses some of the studies that contributed to the development of these assessment methods. Two representative studies and a case illustration, which collectively cover the issues of exploration, instrument development and practical use, are outlined here:

  • Study 1 included a series of focus discussions which formed the basis of some of the tools and measures which are developed in Study 2;

  • Study 2 describes the development of a safety climate questionnaire; and

  • the case illustration briefly outlines a case study application of the questionnaire tools developed in Study 2 in a pilot organisation.

The accounts of the development of the behavioural indicators and the semi-structured interview schedule, also included in the assessment process, are outside the scope of the paper and are described within the “Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit” (Cox and Cheyne, 1999). The final discussions are focussed on the mutual experiences of implementing the practical assessment process together with the perceived benefits; e.g. the practical utility of the output of the assessment and the potential for action planning.

Section snippets

Focus discussion groups (Study 1)

The first study was concerned with exploring employees' understanding and perception of ‘safety culture’. These shared understandings and underpinning constructs were utilised in the design of subsequent studies and formed the bases of the development of the assessment methodology. Focus discussion groups were employed here for two reasons: (1) to elicit constructs based on individuals' notions of ‘safety culture’; and (2) to provide initial indications of any differences in overall perceptions

Developing assessment methods (Study 2)

The second study is focussed on the development of one of the safety climate assessment tools that are included in the toolkit (see earlier) and also builds upon the constructs developed in Study 1. In particular this study describes the process involved in developing the attitude questionnaire.

Illustration of the toolkit in practice

The developed “Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit” process was initially tested in one organisation involved in hydrocarbon production. The pilot organisation is involved in the extraction of hydrocarbons, operating on various sites world-wide. This organisation had a strong commitment to safety, health and environmental excellence and also has a tradition of ‘quality’. The initial management characterisation of their culture for safety was one of ‘total commitment and safety excellence’. The

Discussion

This paper has described the development of an innovative approach to assessing culture, and specifically safety culture and climate. The development of the “Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit” has exploited the notions of multiple organisational perspectives and data triangulation (Jick, 1979). It utilises approaches which can be combined to provide an in-depth picture of an organisation's current safety climate. During this process reliance is not placed on any single form of assessment, e.g.

Acknowledgements

The studies described in this paper have been funded and supported by the Offshore Safety Division of HSE, Chevron UK, Chevron Gulf of Mexico (Ship Shoal/Eugene Island), Mobil North Sea and Oryx UK. The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin Alexander and Bill Cockburn in the gathering of data. The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not necessarily representative of any other individual or organisation.

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