How to Create a Sustainable Safety Culture Moving from Pound and Blame to Partnering

摘要

Safety cultures do not spontaneously occur. They are created and nourished by honest, authentic operating managers and leaders. These people must insist on high standards and foster trust and interdependence within their organization. This requires open, freely flowing information that people at all levels in the organization can access, analyze and use to keep their workplace, the hazardous materials and energies under control. This work is focused and relentless, requiring discipline on the part of the whole organization, including the top level managers, front line supervisors, engineers and hands-on employees. This paper presents an operating manager's experience on how he evolved his "pound and blame" managerial culture into a "partnering" culture and successfully improved the organization's safety performance on both the plant's personal safety and process safety metrics. This effort contributes to the well-known "business case" argument for a robust process safety culture, as measured by the significant increase in the plant's operating profit and corresponding process safety-related improvements.