Integrating Personal and Process Safety: Creating World-Class Process Safety Culture and Leadership

Creating World-Class Process Safety Culture and Leadership

Emilia Gempeler, Bob Allbright and Rick Strycker

Senior Latin America Consultant, JMJ Associates

Senior Business Development Director - Americas, JMJ Associates

Director, Research and Development, JMJ Associates

ABSTRACT

In this session, participants will explore how human beings interact with systems and processes. The safety challenges of the 21st century require an integrative approach that brings fresh thinking and sound practices from across industries and among areas of safety specialization. Lessons from the personal and process safetyapproaches have revealed the strengths and weaknesses of each, but little has been done to bring them together. This paper highlights the path to a more integral (whole) solution that has formal and informal leaders applying a set of defined practices to generate a high-performing safety culture.

Looking Beyond Personal or Process Safety

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico riveted attention to the risks inherent in the petroleum industry. Such attention tends to fade into the background until the next catastrophic failure. The Gulf of Mexico tragedy was preceded by other noted disasters around the world, such as the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy in India, the 1988 Piper Alpha North Sea platform explosion and collapse, the 1998 Longford Gas Plant explosion in Australia, and the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery explosion. These examples from the oil and gas industry have parallels in many other industries.

There is a growing recognition of the complexity of these disasters and how difficult it is to find a single cause or to hold any individual to account for the failure. Company after company has since identified risks and blind spots that, if not addressed, could lead to similar disasters in their own operations.

Participants will focus on what is unique and what is common about the two important safety domains—personal safety and process safety. An integral (whole) approach to safety incorporates aspects of both,

grounding them in an unshakeable commitment to send workers home to their families every day without harm.

The Process Safety World

Process safety traditionally refers to an approach for preventing the unexpected release of gases and chemicals, and preventing fires and explosions. The meaning of process safety has expanded and now includes asset integrity, technical integrity or reliability in plants, and major accidents in industries such as mining, rail, air transport, or construction. What is common is a reference to unexpected, potentially catastrophic failures resulting in loss of life and property.These “Black Swans,” or unpredictable events, have become more common than was suggested by statistical prediction models.

One of the most common models used for illustrating the process safetyperspective is the “Swiss cheese” model that includes several layers (or barriers) of protection that potentially prevent hazards from breaking loose(Fig. 1). Each barrier has a mix of plant, process and people components, and each has potential weaknesses, or holes in the Swiss cheese. This approach explicitly deemphasizes blame of individuals, for good reasons, while suggesting that people do have a role in the whole safety situation.

The Personal Safety World

In spite of the focus on process safety failures, the vast majority of workplace injuries continue to result from personal safety incidents; thus, no one can afford a lapse in attention on personal safety. A common definition of personal safety that has become a de facto industry standard is:

Personal safety hazards give rise to incidents—such as slips, trips, falls and vehicle accidents — that

primarily affect one individual worker for each occurrence.

Many personal safety approaches focus on individual behavior, with the goal of either reducing or eliminating behaviors that result in incidents or injuries. Both behavior-based and commitment-based approaches are recognized, and many safety programs include a mix of both. Successful personal safetyapproaches are deeply rooted in values-based actions designed to eliminate worker injury.          

The Best of Both Worlds

The process safety approach views hazards from a broad, systemic perspective, and seeks to eliminate them through analysis, process mapping and organizational learning, while deemphasizing the role of personal responsibility. On the other hand, personal safety approaches focus on influencing individuals’ actions either through intrinsic or extrinsic factors so that people work safely and influence others to do so, as well. From the commitment to eliminating incidents and injuries in the workplace, it seems clear that one should include both personal and processsafety perspectives in a more holistic embrace. Erring too far on one side or the other is not only ineffective, but could be tragic.

For this reason, JMJ believes that the current challenge is to create a safety approach that engages both process and personal safety.

Safety Culture: A Common Denominator

From the personal safety perspective, a positive safety culture is needed to sustain the personal commitments and new behaviors that correspond with working in an injury-free manner. From the process safetyperspective, safety culture is seen as a primary way to reinforce competencies for uncovering and then resolving latent process hazards.

Safety culture is widely seen as an essential context for sustaining both personal and process safety interventions. Therefore, creating a positive and highly developed culture is one way to reinforce both personal and process safetyperspectives. However, the meaning of safety culture is mostly taken for granted, and there is no widely shared understanding either of what it is or how it can be changed when it is necessary to do so.

The Practices of a High-Performing Safety Culture

It has been JMJ’s experience that companies may be strong in some of the Practices of a High-Performing Safety Culture but rarely in all of these practices:

Engaging People in a Vision

Listening to People

Reporting without Fear of Blame

Mobilizing People

Renewing Practices, Processes and Procedures

Building Overlapping Layers of Protection

Caring Actively

Together, these seven practices can contribute to the development of a culture in which people look out for one another, the business and the environment, by identifying and eliminating all types of hazards, both personal and organizational.

To summarize, safety culture is a pattern of shared assumptions, values and beliefs that shape people’s relationship to safety and result in better or worse safety performance. The seven practices outlined above reflect those of a highly developed safety culture and can be a catalyst for moving a low-performing culture toward high-performing process and personal safety

Safety Leadership and Culture

Cultural change comes from two directions—the application of advanced safety practices and deep transformation of values and assumptions. The presence of effective leadership is key to each, and the type of leadership needed shifts according to the depth of change needed.

A key distinction important to leadership is between “formal” leadership, or those with formal authority, and leadership that can come from anyone, regardless of where they sit on the organizational chart. The other key distinction is between the types of challenges leaders face, which are either “technical” or “adaptive.” Technical problems have a known solution, and adaptive challenges, by definition, require transformational learning on the part of both leaders and followers in order to resolve them.

Creating a workplace free of injuries and incidents requires a mix of all four aspects of leadership. Both formal and informal leaders must take on the challenges, some of which are technical, and many that are adaptive and thus require personal and organizational transformation.

In Conclusion

Personal safety and process safety are distinct, yet both important to the attainment of a workplace that is free of incidents and injuries. Personal and process safety each include a unique perspective, a trained “set of eyes” to perceive the hazards associated with those domains. It will not do, therefore, to substitute one for the other, or to pay too much attention to one area over the other. There is value in distinguishing the perspectives of both personal and process safety, and even greater value in integrating them.