Abstract of Meeting Paper

Society for Risk Analysis - Europe 1998 Annual Meeting

The Effect of Culture on the Safety Climate of Offshore Installations. Kathryn Mearns, University of St. Andrews,UK

This paper addresses the relation between the concept of 'safety culture' and 'safety climate' with reference to the UK offshore oil and gas industry. It begins by making a distinction between the two concepts before illustrating how culture forms and informs climate with respect to organisational safety. This is done by comparing how personnel on 11 offshore oil and gas installations, operated by six different companies, perceived risk and safety on their own particular installation. It is suggested that senior management within the individual companies try to create a particular 'culture' with respect to health and safety, but that the context of the operating environment and the particular activities which the installation is engaged in, determines the prevailing "safety climate" which is of far more relevance to the offshore worker. It is argued that perhaps organisations should pay more attention to how their 'safety culture', in the form of norms, values, assumptions and philosophies map onto their rules, policies, procedures and how these, in turn, are perceived and enacted by the workforce in a particular environmental context. This premise is currently being investigated in a health and safety benchmarking study, involving 13 offshore organisations over the next two years.