The Hearts and Minds Project in an Operating Company: Developing Tools to Measure Cultural Factors

Abstract

Abstract The Hearts and Minds project is being carried out to improve safety performance across the Oman oil industry. The objective is to identify how people can become intrinsically motivated for good HSE behaviour and to develop (micro-) tools to achieve such well motivated behaviour in a simple and effective manner, optimally tuned to the cultures in the organisation. The Hearts and Minds programme involves two components. One is the development of tools to measure the safety culture, readiness to change and national cultural factors. The second involves the development of ‘micro-tools’ to produce development of safety culture. This paper reports the results of the first stage. Reliable and simple scales to measure safety culture and readiness to change have been developed. The results show differences between PDO and a number of its major contractors. Most interestingly there are reliable differences between managers, supervisors and workforce that are independent of the company. Managers are invariably more open to change and have higher evaluations of the safety culture than do either supervisors or the workforce. A replication of Hofstede's scales for the measurement of national culture was also successful. The scales measured were Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Collectivism-Individualism and Masculinity-Femininity. Significant differences have been found between different groups that have considerable implications for the development of safety culture and the implementation of initiatives in general. This paper also discusses the consequences of the results for implementation of safety initiatives within a company that is characterised by being culturally extremely diverse. Introduction One of the greatest problems facing a multi-national organisation, operating in the global market, is the diversity of cultures with which it has to work. In times gone past it was sufficient to stamp a single corporate culture, emanating from head office and propagated by expatriate managers. Today the roles are reversed, cultures have to be respected and the expatriates are now in head office. Furthermore the realisation has grown that one of the reasons why management, such as the implementation of safety programs, has been difficult is because those programs were forced upon the work force, top-down, in a ‘one size fits all’ methodology. In early days this approach worked and safety performance improved markedly. But this is not entirely surprising as almost anything was likely to have some positive effect. More recently the systematic safety management approach, generalised to HSE-management systems, has been predominantly culture free. The main requirement for acceptance of HSE management systems within an organisation is the possession of an organisational culture that is comfortable with bureaucratic control.