Addressing the Gaps Between Occupational and Process Safety Culture

Abstract

Abstract Safety culture has been identified as a critical element in high consequence incidents in the oil and gas industry over the past few decades. Traditionally, safety culture, which is the collection of beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the stakeholders within an organization regarding safety, has been viewed in terms of occupational safety: i.e., perception of components and norms that affect personal safety. It is clear that lapses in occupational safety can lead to injuries or fatalities to individual workers. However, lapses in process safety can cause injuries or fatalities to groups of workers or the public, or extensive damage to the facility and environment. The visible nature of hazards to individual workers often leads companies to focus more on occupational safety culture as opposed to process safety culture since occupational safety performance is easier to recognize. Process safety hazards are related to the process, conditions which are not necessarily obvious but are hidden within the complex systems comprising the chemical, mechanical, and controls of the process unit. Thus, process safety requires engineering discipline to systematically identify and manage the potential hazards posed by a process system throughout its life. Process safety culture is the collective group of values (i.e., beliefs, perceptions, attitudes) and behaviors that affect the safety management of processes in an organization. In the traditional safety culture assessment approach, the focus is on individual behavior, attitudes, and perception of process safety concerns such as management of change, process hazard analyses, near-miss reporting, etc. has been missing. Due to such gaps, the application of traditional safety culture assessment tools and methods in the process industry does not provide a comprehensive status of the state of process safety culture in such organizations. The objective of this paper is to discuss the differences between the occupational safety culture and process safety culture assessment techniques and present methods and guidelines to develop a process safety culture assessment tool.