Summary
Demands on the petroleum industry are driving continual improvement of
health, safety, and environment (HSE) performance. It has become widely
recognized that the deliberate and structured creation of HSE culture directly
affects HSE performance. Developing HSE culture is a complex recipe that
combines values, leadership, management systems and processes, behavioral and
cognitive psychology, technology, equipment, and HSE expertise. This
combination creates a culture or “way of working in the
organization.”
There are many theoretical and practical papers on the creation and
assessment of HSE culture. For a leader in E&P operations, the
distillation of this large body of knowledge into an appropriate course of
action can be a daunting task. A generic HSE cultural-maturity model is
provided in this work. HSE culture is further defined in terms of
cultural dimensions. To improve HSE performance, development of culture cannot
be confined within an E&P operator’s organization. Contractors,
partners, service providers, and suppliers must also be included in the
development of HSE culture. Guidance is provided to help the E&P
practitioner work collaboratively with contractors to develop, sustain, and
improve HSE culture and performance. Pragmatic examples are provided for
diagnosing HSE culture.
Introduction
Petroleum industry stakeholders (e.g., communities, governments,
shareholders, employees, and nongovernmental organizations) are requiring
ever-improving HSE performance. Today, delivering world-class HSE and
operational-excellence performance cannot be realized through policies,
management systems, processes, or technology alone. While the foregoing
aspects are important prerequisites to establishing world-class HSE
performance, more is needed.
HSE culture is recognized today as one of the key ingredients to delivering
world-class HSE performance in E&P operations, as well as numerous other
industries (Roughton and Mercurio 2002; Pemberton 1998; Reed 1996; Tharaldsen
and Lindeberg 2004; Johnson 2005; Pizzi et al. 2005; Petersen 1993, 2005;
Lawrie 2002; Stewart 2002). Quantitative relationships have been
established between HSE culture and HSE performance on the basis of the
workforce cultural surveys (Stewart 2002; Mearns and Thom 2002; Chevron Corp.
2004a), as given in Table 1. In this example, high favorability based on a
workforce survey is indicative of a mature HSE culture, which has a
statistically significant relationship with lower incident rates.
HSE culture must be consciously developed, monitored, and continually
improved. This paper builds on the current body of work on HSE
culture. Provision of methods and techniques for creating the enabling
culture and mindset required to sustain and maintain continual improvement of
HSE results are given.
© 2006. Society of Petroleum Engineers
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History
- Original manuscript received:
15 March 2006
- Manuscript approved:
3 May 2006
- Version of record:
20 September 2006
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