Safety climate as an indicator for major accident risk: Can we use safety climate as an indicator on the plant level?

Abstract

Measuring safety climate is regarded a proactive approach to safety management. With increased focus on developing indicators for major accidents, there is a need to critically assess the effectiveness of current practices in providing early warning signals for organizations at risk. The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the ability of safety climate tools to assess the risk of major accidents on the plant level. Using data material from the Norwegian offshore oil and gas operations, we have tested whether three major close call incidents could be detected through using safety climate data from the period before the incidents. We examined the problem through testing (1) if the installations in question deviated from the industry average, and (2) if the trends for the installations could reveal that something was wrong. The results are inconclusive; only one of the installations deviates negatively from the industry average one year before the incident, and the trend variations are so small that it is questionable if they would have triggered actions from the management. The challenges when relying on safety climate as a means of managing risk of major accidents on individual installations are discussed.

Safety culture and power: Interactions between perceptions of safety culture, organisational hierarchy, and national culture

“…Power has been defined variously by psychology researchers. For example, many researchers describe power in terms of resource control (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003;Magee & Galinsky, 2009); others consider power in terms of relational influence (French & Raven, 1959;Raven, 1992). In either case, these are explicit theories of power with explicit measures.…”

Is perception of safety climate a relevant predictor for occupational accidents? Prospective cohort study among blue-collar workers

“…Numerous studies today explicitly or implicitly regard safety climate as a leading indicator capable of predicting safety outcomes (5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10). However, research on safety climate as a leading indicator for accidents specifically is still limited, as most empirical studies are retrospective rather than prospective, as shown in a 2009 review by Payne et al (11).…”

Health, safety and environmental (HSE) regulation and outcomes in the offshore oil and gas industry: Performance review of trends in the United Kingdom Continental Shelf

“…That is, lagging indicators are focused or show the number and or severity of events (accidents or incidents) which have occurred whereas leading indicators can often be measured without an incident and accident occurring(Rozendal & Hale, 2000;Kaassis & Badri, 2018).Historically in the oil and gas industry, HSE performance measures have traditionally focused on the physical aspects of operations such as technical and operational integrity resulting in injuries, cases of ill health or asset losses(Bergh et al, 2014;Rozendal & Hale, 2000). However, this has changed in the past decade with a greater focus on proactive actions such as measuring the safety climate via human and organisational factors, and emergency preparedness, among others(Sneddon et al, 2013;Olsen et al, 2015;Kvalheim et al, 2016).Table1below summarises some of the leading and lagging indicators used in the offshore oil and gas industry.…”