Getting Serious About Safety: Accountability And Leadership - The Forgotten Elements

Abstract

Abstract The paper sets out a model specifying the four elements required to deliver breakthrough safety performance, focusing on accountability for safety and strong leadership, although this needs to be applied in conjunction with workforce involvement and management commitment. Drawing on the experience of Shell U.K. Exploration and Production, this paper highlights the role accountability and leadership have played in improving the company's safety performance. The motivation to change behaviour was achieved by making explicit the link between actions and their consequence, in terms of linking safety to reward and career progression. This paper illustrates the controlled manner in which this was done based on Kotter's (1996) model of organisational change[1]. The provision of skills for people to make a behavioural change was done through training all staff on Shell Expro locations in how to intervene if someone is acting in an unsafe way and how to respond to an intervention. The other key skill identified as essential to delivering this message in a constructive non-threatening way is leadership style. The paper demonstrates - in Bass's classification scheme - that a transformational leadership style is the most effective way for senior managers to communicate their commitment in a believable form[2]. Introduction Shell U.K. Exploration and Production1 (Shell Expro) is an operator in the U.K. sector of the North Sea on behalf of Shell, Esso and other co-venturers. Prior to the mid 1990s, Shell Expro made continuous and significant improvements in safety through improvements in systems and processes but for the last seven years the safety performance has been on a plateau. Although this trend is comparable with the overall UKCS trend for the same period, it is not consistent with the company's business principles of continuous improvement and no harm to people, hence this plateau has become a real driver for change. Understanding why the company's safety performance has remained largely static is quite straightforward, but redressing this problem is a much tougher challenge. The industry overall has excelled at improving hardware, utilising the latest technology and creating robust safety management systems, all of which have helped previously to reduce the number of people hurt each year. Improvements in this area meant that the human element in accidents became more predominant in their causal sequence. A plateau developed at least partly because significant improvements in safety performance at this level of cultural maturity can only be achieved through affecting the human factors causes. In response to this the company is now devoting much greater focus to human factors at both an organisational, group, and individual level. form[2]. Human factors in Shell Expro In the past Shell Expro has often been at the vanguard of applying human factors tools, most notably TRIPOD[3] as well as sponsoring the development of other human factors techniques[4][5].