(107a) Improving Process Safety Culture through Behavioral Based Process Safety

Process Safety cultural assessments can provide valuable insight into a company’s culture, leadership commitment, management systems, workforce involvement, operational discipline and more. But what happens when the assessment is complete, and the site is left with a list of action items? What about when the cultural assessment is part of a larger process safety management (PSM) audit and there are even more action items? Oftentimes we see that the cultural items fall to the end of the priority list, as the items with more immediate and high visible risk are addressed. Cultural items are complex and generally involve long term processes, systems, attitude, and behavior changes and can be difficult to “sell” when balancing resource constraints.

Focused and intentional actions can help us achieve measurable differences to improve process safety culture – we propose taking actions through Behavior Based Process Safety (BBPS). Similar to the occupational safety focused Behavior Based Safety, BBPS utilizes 1 on1 interactions with different levels of the workforce to have critical conversations about process safety related activities. Utilizing a checklist to help drive these conversations to record observations, BBPS helps engage everyone in the organization from the boots on the ground workers to leadership to take individual actions to recognize how their actions impact process safety and how they can make a difference. This information can then be used to do a health check on culture within the site and then identify areas for improvement.

Inspired from learnings from hundreds of PSM audits and the associated action item prioritization conversations, BBPS is a measurable and actionable way to help address process safety cultural change and, as the common phrase goes, eat the elephant one bite at a time. This paper will provide an overview of the BBPS methodology and case studies of how this approach can help make meaningful and sustainable impacts to process safety programs, following the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle for continuous improvement. Main topics will include:

• BBPS field audit checklists
• Conversation guides for identifying process safety related behaviors in common tasks (i.e., when talking with a craftsperson, ask about the current job they are working on, what hazards they may encounter, what they are doing to remain safe with the hazards, and the documentation)
• How to leverage the learnings from the checklists and conversations to improve the culture and process safety program
• Utilizing the learnings to develop safety moment/toolbox talk one-pagers to share with the site