Creating and Sustaining Excellent Process Safety Culture and Leadership – Keys to Sustainable Process Safety Performance and Operational Excellence

Creating and Sustaining Excellent Process Safety Culture and Leadership – Keys to Sustainable Process Safety Performance and Operational Excellence

The Center for Chemical Process Safety made process safety culture an official process safety management element when it published its Risk Based Process Safety Guidelines.  Embedded in that element chapter were the key work practices to establish a management system to nurture process safety culture and 12 essential features of a good culture.  Over the past seven years, other organizations in several industries have proposed various frameworks to understand and assess safety culture.  This paper will compare of the different aspects of safety culture science, research, and practices:

• Definitions of safety culture
• Scales/descriptions used to rank cultures
• 10+ frameworks developed for understanding culture in various industries and locations
• Methods for measurement/analysis of culture
• Data sources available for these methods
• Summary of culture evaluation case studies
• Ways to improve culture weaknesses and promote culture strengths
• Ways to monitor culture on a real-time basis
• Classification of safety culture degradation histories
• Case studies of several culture disease pathologies
• Practical remedies for prevention and mitigation of safety culture disease

In recent years, we have performed over 35 culture evaluations of companies involving hundreds of facilities, tens of thousands of employees and contractors, across all global regions and ethnic cultures.

We developed a process to cross-correlate the culture survey responses with the companies’ key performance indicators. By reviewing a number of the evaluations together it is possible to see a clear causal relationship, between specific safety culture weaknesses and company safety performance.  Many of these will not be a surprise to practitioners but the work enables us to provide the “demonstration” that, for example, poor process safety leadership leads to an increase in API-Tier-2 event. These weaknesses represent the current "disease states" for these companies.  In several cases, we were able to determine the historical disease pathways, i.e. what was it in the corporate culture that led to the degradation over time.  And, we have now companies that have adopted practical measures to prevent, mitigate, and recover from safety culture disease.

This paper will summarize practical means that senior executives, plant managers, engineers, and operating and maintenance staff can adopt to avoid safety culture disease.  We will summarize the lessons from a number of case study evaluations, characterize common culture degradation patterns among these different companies and provide suggestions for vaccinating companies against future process safety culture disease.