(25b) Guidelines for Creating a Process Safety Culture Assessment Tool

The concept of safety culture has been defined as collective shared beliefs within an organization that affect the attitudes and behavior of individuals, and play a critical role in safe work performance in the organization. Due to the number and severity of incidents in the process industry, investigations conducted by federal agencies and investigative committees have concluded that the process safety culture within organizations of the industry needs to be to evaluated, understood, and improved upon to mitigate hazards. But safety culture is a social constructhow can engineers measure such an abstract concept?

Various methodologies have been discussed in literature that may assist a company in this endeavor. However, benchmarking and tracking safety culture within each organization can be highly specific to each company. How can benchmarking be distinguished from common sense or just engineering judgment? This paper addresses this question and introduces a methodology for process safety culture assessment. The paper will suggest a framework for collecting and accessing data on the determinants of process safety culture and will define a methodology that may be utilized to measure the process safety culture within an organization. The results of such an analysis may help provide insight into enhancement of safety programs.