Enhancing Safety Performance through Cultural Maturity: A Comprehensive Framework for Multinational Oil and Gas Operations

This article presents the results of a comprehensive HSE Review conducted through four subsidiaries of an oil & gas company to provide insights and recommendations to enhance its existing HSE culture and system. The HSE review was carried out for subsidiaries in North America, Middle East and Western Europe. It involved reviewing more than 600 documents, conducting over 100 interviews, spending about 130 hours on field visits to evaluate the effectiveness of HSE system implementation, and gathering input from more than 1,500 participants in a safety climate survey.
The methodology relies on one hand, on a Safety Culture Maturity framework to analyze perceptions at different levels of the organization, and on the other hand, on expert judgment following field observations and interactions with workforce and management across all subsidiaries. The overall results highlight perceived strengths and gaps in the current different elements of Safety culture at each subsidiary and highlight specific perceived strengths and shortcoming in Safety Culture. A second section of the article discusses how maturity models can be a legitimate tool despite some inherent limitations underlined by part of the safety science research community, alongside a consideration of some common critique of the safety culture construct. The article gives an illustration of how practitioners can use maturity models and how the results support the development of improvement plans that integrate key risk themes to drive effective & sustainable enhancement. We also argue from a safety practitioner's point of view that using maturity models give the opportunity to drive stake-holders' ownership and commitment that may be eventually more important that the maturity score or rank.
The paper provides elements for a better understanding of how underpinnings of maturity models articulate with assessment of safety culture and explore their methodological properties to show how some theoretical weaknesses can paradoxically become competitive advantages in the practical implementation of safety improvement approaches.

Keywords: Safety culture, Maturity models, Safety performance.