Development of a comprehensive multi-component toolkit for offshore safety culture assessment

This paper presents the development of a comprehensive self-assessment safety culture toolkit for the U.S. offshore oil and gas industry. Safety culture impacts organizational safety performance. Measuring safety culture will help an organization better understand the room for safety improvement. The major components of this toolkit are safety culture surveys, interviews, site safety walkthroughs, a review of previous incident investigations, a review of potential leading indicators (accident precursors), and a Safety and Environmental Management System (SEMS) review. This multi-component toolkit is expected to allow a comprehensive assessment of the offshore safety culture at single or multiple facilities. With careful wording of survey questions, safety culture surveys can provide insight into employee perceptions of safety. The paper discusses how safety culture surveys can be incorporated with all other key components to give a more complete picture of an organization’s safety culture. A safety maturity model is proposed to incorporate the results from these safety culture measurements to describe an organization’s safety maturity level. Like many safety maturity models, the model in this toolkit describes the safety culture maturity in a range from a reaction to events to continual improvement. The analysis of crucial safety culture-related assessment components supports the identification of a safety culture maturity level.