Cram, Robert and Sime, Julie-Ann (2015) A paradigm shift in organisational safety culture evaluation and training. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
The focus of this research is to explore the issues surrounding traditional approaches towards understanding the safety culture of an organisation operating in a high risk environment and to identify an effective technique to educate corporate management in how to measure and evaluate the underlying safety culture of their own organisations. The results of the first part of the research highlight the concerns being expressed by both academic and industrial communities that current safety culture survey questionnaire techniques exhibit significant flaws and that a new approach to more accurately identify safety culture is necessary. It has been demonstrated that sufficient data are available to any organisation which cares to record it and that this information can be used to model safety culture without the need to continually disrupt the organisation with intrusive surveys. Part two of the project involves the development of a learning environment based on an expert model of an oil company which is designed to educate management in this approach to safety culture evaluation. Constructed using a rapid prototyping approach, the learning environment is presented individually to a group of volunteers from a variety of industrial disciplines and experiences who undertake the full training programme. A case study methodology is used to examine the data collected and this demonstrates that participating in the learning environment experience results in improved awareness of how to uncover safety culture issues. The outcome of this research is a paradigm shift in how to measure and evaluate safety culture. From the analysis of the data, supported by feedback from the participants, it is shown that this is an effective solution to fulfilling both of the aforementioned requirements. Work has begun to adapt the tool so that it can be used in other industries such as mining, construction and nuclear energy.