(53g) Case Study of Leadership and Process Safety Culture | a Blended Experience to Think the Future - How to Lead Discipline-Oriented Cultures, in Scenarios of Growing Virtuality

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, the greatest effort and organizational commitment was aimed at responding to the great global emergency. But the Pandemic was also a great accelerator of jobs of increasing virtuality, in which leaders and workers discovered the best ways to handle challenging situations and unprecedented scenarios, from a distance.

With less access by managers to the fields, supervision became a key actor to ensure reliable operations. Thus, one of the conclusions to think about the Process Safety Culture towards the future is that individuals do not impose a personal style of managing risks in isolation, but rather adapt to group agreements, displaying safe or unsafe behaviors as required. that is tolerated collectively. In short, field operators and supervisors take the risks that culture allows them to take.

In this blend fieldwork (face-to-face and virtual) we present an experience in which the transition to the so-call new normal could be addressed, and the lessons they leave, managing the Process Safety Culture for the coming years.

Some of the processes that will need review by all levels of leadership, in the immediate future are - basic skills on how to formalize requests and check understanding to how to handle peer pressure, increase the sense of vulnerability or combat the normalization of deviance.

Supervision is the true executing arm of organizations in the field. And for this organizational segment to ensure a disciplined operation, they need to be able to manage the culture. A common mistake in the risk management approach has been to think of the lack of operational discipline of supervision as a problem of isolated individuals, and not of the context in which these people work, that is, the context produced by the culture. When analyzing the supervision segment, one should not think of undisciplined people, but cultures that tolerate or reinforce risky behaviors.

One of the keys is to generate spaces for the management of culture collectively, that provide feedback without physical presence, effectively using digital channels, addressing group problems, and not individual ones.

The challenge is that operational discipline is not a statement of principles but a reality in the field. And the pandemic, paradoxically, provided an opportunity to improve the quality of worker development, personalizing it.

The next decade leaves a central challenge: to transform supervision teams into custodians of the safety culture of processes and guarantors of risk management, in a growing virtuality.