(46a) Case Studies and Lessons from Process Safety Culture Improvement Initiatives

Many have recognized the importance of organizational culture in major accident prevention. As a result, companies have undertaken long-term efforts to assess, improve and maintain a good process safety/HSE culture. This paper will summarize lessons from 40+ safety culture improvement initiatives addressing results from:

• 39 studies to assess culture using several measurement frameworks and tools
• 15 programs to use the results for culture assessments to improve the process safety DNA in various organizational layers from executives to first line supervisors to contractors
• 7 efforts to measure culture improvement over a multiple-year period

In addition, this paper will address some especially challenging issues faced by companies wanting to improve process safety culture:

Improving contractor culture

• Addressing multi-ethnic workforces
• Increasing process safety ownership across a site
• Near real-time measurement of culture
• Equipping everyone to be Culture Agent

We will highlight a few cases where the improvement in culture has been tied to improvement in process safety metrics as well as overall safety performance.