Assessing safety culture in offshore environments - Industrial Centre

126 S.J. Cox, A.J.T. Cheyne / Safety Science 34 (2000) 111±129ences between managers, production teams and drilling teams. A series of one-wayanalyses of variance were performed for each factor in the attitude questionnaire.Di€erences in mean scores (standardised to a 10-point scale for each factor) for eachof the three groups are shown in Table 6.Di€erences were found in six of the questionnaire dimensions with drilling teamsshowing signi®cantly lower evaluations than managers in terms of Supportiveenvironment, Involvement, Personal appreciation of risk and Work environmentand lower evaluations of Communication and Personal priorities than both managersand production teams. Production teams, however, only di€ered signi®cantlyfrom managers in terms of Involvement, Personal appreciation of risk and workenvironment. These ®nding are consistent with those of Mearns et al. (1998) suggestingthat drilling teams, who often belong to another `parent organisation' mayhave their own sub-culture and may, consequently, ®nd themselves outside variouscommunication channels.4.2. DiscussionUsers found the process straightforward and found little diculty in constructingtheir safety climate pro®le. Users then examined the initial questionnaire items andinterview responses in order to get some notion of the exact nature of any problemshighlighted by poor scores. This investigation revealed that a large number ofemployees felt that they were not involved, in, or informed of, safety initiatives,indeed it was perceived that a small group of `select' people were the only individualsinvolved in any safety activities, and these individuals gave little, or no, support toothers on safety issues. These feelings were also re¯ected with regard to safetytraining. Once again, the majority of those questioned felt that they were notinformed of relevant training or encouraged to attend courses, other than thoselegally required.Several initiatives are planned as a result of these ®ndings. Firstly, the users havedecided to actively promote, with the help of the training manager, the range ofsafety training courses on o€er. This involves listings of appropriate coursesappearing in the company newsletter, as well as announcements at all team meetingsin an attempt to reach the various `sub-cultures'. Team meetings are also to be used,in the ®rst instance, to encourage individuals to get involved in, and indeed to propose,new safety initiatives. The user will reassess the safety climate pro®le whenthese measures have been in place for at least 1 year.5. DiscussionThis paper has described the development of an innovative approach to assessingculture, and speci®cally safety culture and climate. The development of the ``SafetyClimate Assessment Toolkit'' has exploited the notions of multiple organisationalperspectives and data triangulation (Jick, 1979). It utilises approaches which can becombined to provide an in-depth picture of an organisation's current safety climate.