(40c) Establishing Process Safety Culture Framework and Developing Behavioral Competency

Whenever a company embarks on the journey of safety culture transformation, it finds it challenging to integrate safety culture into existing procedures and practices. Additionally, for companies that have established process safety management, maintaining organizational safety culture becomes challenging. Chola MS Risk has worked extensively on developing strategies for safety culture transformation and sustenance.

This paper is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the strategy for developing and establishing the safety culture framework for different process safety elements of CCPS RBPS Management System Accident Prevention Pillar (Operating Procedures, Safe Work Practices, Asset Integrity and Reliability, Contractor Safety Management, Training and Performance Assurance, Management of Change, Operational Readiness, and Emergency Management). The second part of the paper focuses on using the safety culture framework for developing behavioral competency requirements required at different levels of the company.

Firstly, to ensure that the process safety culture framework for each process safety element is analyzed critically and qualitatively, a structured brainstorming approach considering each aspect of the process safety element as a component or system has been conceptualized and applied across different sectors of industry. This idea has stemmed from the combination of the traditional guideword approach of Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) study, drawing analogy with the risk acceptability criteria. The brief methodology consists of the following steps:

- This facilitation workshop shall be conducted by an independent person and carried out with the participation of operators, supervisors, engineers, and managers.

- Breaking down the process safety element into smaller aspects covering the expectations of the element.

- For each aspect of the process safety element, the associated values and beliefs are identified. These are similar to parameters in HAZOP.

- CCPS culture core principles (e.g., Imperative for safety, strong leadership, sense of vulnerability, understanding and acting upon hazards/risks, empowerment and safety responsibility, deferring to expertise, frank and open communication, fostering mutual trust, normalization of deviance, assessing and advancing culture, etc.) are also applied to the aspect of the process safety element. These are similar to guidewords in HAZOP.

- The review items are generated as combinations of CCPS culture core principles and associated values and beliefs. These are similar to deviations in HAZOP.

- Based on the team discussion, behavioral indicators (cultural threats (symptoms) and cultural defenses (positive indicators)) are listed down.

- Eventually, expected norms and behaviors are established for each aspect of the process safety element. These are similar to risk acceptability criteria.

- Overall, this structured review would help in establishing the process safety culture framework and applying the framework for determining intervention programs. This approach effectively integrates safety culture into each of the process safety elements.

Secondly, to develop behavioral competency, the above process safety culture framework is used to establish the required competency at each level of the company. Eventually, a 360-degree feedback and gap analysis is conducted against the behavioral competency to understand the existing behavioral competency an employee possesses. This approach helps in maintaining the organizational culture and sustaining the safety culture at different levels of the company.

Overall, this paper details the methodology for developing and establishing the process safety culture framework for different process safety elements of CCPS RBPS Management System Accident Prevention Pillar. The developed safety culture frameworks will be presented as case studies. Also, the detailed process of developing behavioral competency will be presented with case studies.