Relationship of Safety Performance and Safety Culture Survey Result in Japanese Oil and Chemical Plants: Focusing on Employees’ Perception of Three Major Functions in Plants

Production, maintenance and HSE departments are three major functions to manage safety in a chemical plant. This paper is to discuss how employees’ perception in these three departments effects to safety performance such as fatal accidents or major safety issues. The employees’ perception of safety culture was measured through safety culture survey designed by our team. This questionnaire survey composed 110 questions, which categorized into eight axes. The eight axes are “Governance”, “Commitment”, "Communication", "Awareness", "Learning", "Motivation", "Resource Management" and "Work Management". Through these eight axes, we are able to measure several aspects of safety culture, including technical practice and organizational management. 18,365 employees from 87 plants in Japanese oil refinery and chemical plants responded the survey. As the result, when production department and maintenance department in a plant show low score in safety culture, such plants tend to have high possibilities to experience major accidents or safety issues. Although, when either production department or maintenance department have high score in safety culture, these plants tend to have low possibilities to experience major accidents or major safety issues. Safety culture scores of HSE departments are usually the highest in these three departments on most plants, but when HSE department’s safety culture scores are same or lower than other two departments, it shows safety culture of these plants are in critical situation. These result may help to build safety management strategy in following points; 1) Understanding either function (production or maintenance) works as final protection layer from major accidents or safety issues are important to design and maintain safety in fields, 2) To avoid major accidents or incidents, company and plant management should aware not to deteriorate safety culture of department works as “Final protection layer” when plant not experiencing major accidents or safety issues recently and 3) Understand HSE departments perception are usually very high compared to other two function, and when their perception deteriorated, plant are in critical situation. From this study, we recommend monitoring of safety culture perception of each employee to determine risks to experience major accidents or safety issues.