The Baker Panel Report - ABSA

distrust or hostility, this relationship will negatively affect safety culture. In any case, it is the quality of the relationship between managementand the rest of the workforce that is the key factor, not whether the workforce is organized.Another dominant theme from Cherry Point interviews was that “safety comes first.” Few of the workers interviewed at Cherry Point disagreedwith the refinery’s HSE Handbook, which declares that “BP Cherry Point Refinery’s number one goal is to be the safest operating refinery in theworld.” The prevailing attitude at Cherry Point appeared to be that “everyone works to get safety right.” Most of the workforce interviewed saidthey believed that Cherry Point truly wanted to learn from incidents and near misses: reporting was encouraged, incidents were investigatedwith a view toward making things better, and safety incidents from outside the refinery were reviewed for any potential application to CherryPoint policies and procedures.Process safety culture survey data substantiate many of these conclusions. For example, many Cherry Point employees and contractorsexpressed a belief that they could influence process safety policies implemented at their refinery. Table 17 below contains percentages ofpositive responses (in descending order) from contractors and employees at the Cherry Point refinery.Table 17“I feel that I can influence theprocess safety policiesimplemented at this refinery.”‡ Fewer than 25 respondents were in this group.Cherry Point GroupPercentages of Agree/Tend toAgree ResponsesMaintenance Management ‡ 100Operations Management 98Engineering Professionals 95Full-Time HSSE Employees 88Operators 80Maintenance/Craft Technicians 74Contractors 66While the positive response rate from contractors was lower than the positive response rates from other groups, only 13 percent of contractorsindicated a belief that they could not influence policies; the remaining 22 percent either did not know or did not have an opinion on the matter.Corporate Safety Culture C 98