Assessing safety culture in offshore environments - Industrial Centre

112 S.J. Cox, A.J.T. Cheyne / Safety Science 34 (2000) 111±129In the wake of such changes, a Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum has beenestablished to facilitate the sharing of safe working practices. The members of thisforum recently highlighted a number of indicators of improved safety performance(Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum, 1997), including an overall decrease inreported injury frequency rates and an estimated $5 billion in investments in healthand safety-related improvements. However, despite these overall e€orts, there issome evidence to suggest that the rate of improvement, as measured by accident/injury frequency, has slowed down over the past 2 years (HSE, 1997; Cox andCheyne, 1999). Furthermore the Cross Industry Safety Leadership Forum (1997)have also con®rmed that much of the existing e€orts in support of these improvementshave been focused upon technology and management systems rather thanhuman factors. They also suggest that potential for future improvements may bestbe realised through enhanced e€orts in the areas of human factors and through theassociated developments in health and safety culture. In light of this initiative thispaper considers how o€shore installation managers can gauge their safety culture.Discussion here focuses on the development of a generic safety culture assessmentmethodology which was designed to support improvements in safety performanceacross the sector.This paper describes a series of studies that are focused on the practical needs ofo€shore managers and workers for the monitoring of safety culture through thedevelopment of a self-assessment tool. It aims to give a broad overview of thedevelopment of this methodology (Cox and Cheyne, 1999) and draws heavily uponrecent work carried out in the UK sector of the North Sea. It also explores thepractical utility of the concept in o€shore environments. The methods describedhere are concerned with both the development and piloting of this tool. Whereas themethodology is based on sound safety science, the overall aim of the assessmentprocess is to chart a path through, what is increasingly becoming, a conceptualmine®eld (Cox and Flin, 1998), and one in which researchers have been challengedby industry to address practical issues (Cox and Lacey, 1998). Although much hasbeen done in other sectors (e.g. Hale and Hovden, 1998; Hofmann and Stetzer,1998) in these studies the cultural context for investigation is set within the o€shoreindustry.1.1. Previous studiesA number of previous studies in o€shore environments have, either directly orindirectly, considered employee perceptions and elements of health and safety culture.In an early study, Marek et al. (1985) examined risk perceptions, stress andaccidents among di€erent work groups on an o€shore installation. They identi®edthe main in¯uences on safety as the implementation of a safety policy, `correct'safety management and safety promoting activities, and incorporation of employees'views in designing safety programmes. Similarly Rundmo (1993) implemented aquestionnaire survey of personnel on eight o€shore installations in the Norwegiansector of the North Sea; ®rstly to determine the personnel evaluations of riskresources and, secondly, to identify di€erences in risk perceptions among di€erent