Safety Culture Maturity Model: A Process Worth Implementing?

Abstract

Abstract Safety culture has become a prevalent concern as recent incidents pointed to the lack of safe behavior or attitude. Organizations are struggling to improve their safety culture in a pragmatic way. Maturity is defined as an evolutionary improvement path from an ad hoc, immature process to a mature, disciplined process. It establishes a yardstick against which it is possible to judge, in a repeatable way, the maturity of an organization's planning process and compare it to the state of the practice of the industry. The maturity model concept was initially developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) as a mechanism to improve the way software is built and maintained. The model provides organisations with a five level process to assist them in developing their software engineering practices. The five levels are Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimising. The safety culture maturity model was initially developed by Dr Mark Fleming, Chartered Psychologist in 2001. Ten elements were documented:Management commitment and visibilityCommunicationProductivity versus safetyLearning organisationSafety resourcesParticipationShared perceptions about safetyTrustIndustrial relations and job satisfactionTraining This paper attempts to explore the adequacy of the maturity model to Oil and gas companies and researches the published various implementations to identify the benefits of such maturity model. Some obvious benefits are a provision of known Maturity Level in relation to the safety culture, with recommendations on how to improve and move from one level to another.