Strong Reporting Culture as Stepping Stone to Continuously Drive Safety Performance Improvement

This session will review the leading indicator research findings drawn from analyzing a large Energy and Chemicals industry data set. The source of research includes data sets and Safety business practices spanning operating sites in over 100 countries involving some global industry leading companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, CITGO, Valero, Total, and multiple others. This session will review the research findings and specifically targets Reporting Culture as an area that was shown to have a strong affect on Safety performance.

Most companies still use lagging incident-based metrics to drive line management behavior. Often times this goes so far to include lagging metrics as part of pay incentives for line management and supervision. Such an approach typically perpetuates a focus on lagging metrics in monthly management performance reports and thus offers top leaders little insight into the effort taken in the field to proactively improve HSE performance.

By balancing these lagging metrics with a carefully chosen short list of ?actionable? metrics targeting key leading areas such as Reporting Culture, line managers are afforded guidance to lead their organizational focus in a manner that positively affects HSE outcomes. And top leaders are afforded the routine monthly measurements to hold line managers accountable to continuously improve.

Through researching a vast data set of routine HSE events (such as near misses, incident investigations, observations, audit findings, hazard reporting, action item management, etc.) and employee engagement in the processes underlying those events, it became apparent that field supervision / line management was the organizational role that most directly influenced HSE outcome performance. And after careful review with Safety executives and Subject Matter Experts, it was also clear that attaining a strong Reporting Culture is a critical milestone necessary to begin the process of proactively driving Safety performance.

The areas that best predicted the Safety outcome performance of an organization included measurements of (a) proactive event reporting (Reporting Culture), (b) the discipline and consistency in execution of HSE processes, (c) the timeliness in closure of important corrective / preventive actions, and finally (d) the responsiveness and accountability of supervisors and line managers. In each of these key areas, solid performance can be attributed to the tone set by leadership and the influential day-to-day behavior of field supervision and line management.

This session will review the measurable leading factors that have been found to be uniquely strong in the organizations with top-level Safety lagging performance. Specifically, we will focus on the importance of Reporting Culture as a stepping stone to continuously improving the key factors that are shown to result in top-tier Safety performance.

We will review some examples of creative technology solutions to reach out to front-line workers and engage them directly in the reporting process. In addition to basic web-based reporting tools, hand-held technology is being used in some heavy manufacturing environments to include inspection and observation-based processes in the overall program of event reporting.

Lastly we will discuss the affects of risk-aware, accountable leadership in each of the key leading areas. And finally, we will demonstrate a process for implementing practical, ?actionable? leading metrics in each key area to drive line manager / leadership behavior and ultimately improve HSE performance outcomes.