Benchmarking The

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Benchmarking: An Internati

Journal, Vol. 8 No. 5, 2

pp. 413-430. # MCB Univer

Press, 1463-5

Benchmarking the safetyclimates of employees and

contractors working within apartnership arrangement

A case study in the offshore oil industryColin W. Fuller and Luise H. Vassie

Health and Safety Group, Scarman Centre, University of Leicester,Leicester, UK

Keywords Benchmarking, Health and safety, Partnering, Contracting outAbstract Partnership arrangements in industry have increased in interest because of the

perceived business benefits that these alliances can bring to organisations. However, it has beenclaimed that it is important to align organisational cultures in order that these partnershiparrangements are successful. This case study reports a benchmark assessment of employee andcontractor safety climates in an offshore oil company that operated contractor partnershipagreements in the North Sea. The study used a questionnaire in order to assess safety climates interms of employees' and contractors' perceptions of safety management, workplace conditionsand safety concerns. Factor analysis and structural equation modelling were used to support thebenchmark study in order to compare the employees' and contractors' beliefs in the organisation'shealth and safety philosophy. The results obtained indicated that safety climates could be alignedin organisations that operate partnership agreements within a recognised health and safetymanagement system. It is suggested that the approach presented is appropriate for benchmarking

safety climates before and after partnership arrangements have been established in order todetermine the level of cultural alignment that has been achieved.

IntroductionMost organisations operate in an environment of risk and the key to business

success is to reduce this risk to an acceptable or tolerable level. Health and

safety represents one of the many risks to which organisations are exposed and

therefore managing health and safety effectively should be as important as

managing any other business risk. Health and safety should be a strategic issue

for senior management, as good performance brings rewards beyond merely a

reduction in the levels of accidents and ill-health. Although accident and ill-

health statistics may provide a useful guide for indicating those areas where anorganisation's main risks exist, it should always be remembered that the

absence of accidents and ill-health in operational areas, especially thoseinvolving low probability and high consequence events, does not necessarily

indicate that these areas are managed effectively. While health and safety

management systems provide the foundations for developing an acceptable

safety performance (Health and Safety Executive, 2000), a move towards

excellence is accelerated by the adoption of a continuous improvement

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philosophy (Vassie, 1998) that is supported by the process of benchmarking(Fuller, 1997, 1999).

There has been increased interest in the role of partnership arrangements inindustry because of the perceived benefits that alliances can bring toorganisations (Department of Trade and Industry, 2000). Partnershiparrangements are aimed, primarily, at achieving separate but complementaryobjectives within the participating organisations through collaborativeapproaches that involve a commitment from the parties to co-operate. Thepotential for partnership arrangements to create improvements in thecollaborating organisations' health and safety performances has long beenrecognised and there have been a number of industry initiatives that addressthis issue. For example, the Responsible Care Programme operated by theChemical Industries Association (2001) and the Step Change in SafetyProgramme operated as a cross-industry initiative of the UK oil and gas

industry[1] both encourage partnership arrangements as part of a continuousimprovement ethos in health and safety management. Bresnen and Marshall(2000) claimed that much of the published literature on the benefits ofpartnership arrangements presumed that cultural alignment between thepartners was a necessary pre-requisite for their success. This alignment wasconsidered to be important for generating mutual understanding and co-operation between the partners because significant differences in culture,which are brought about by polarised views, may create conflict. Commonalityof culture creates common reference points, common ways of interpretinginformation and situations and a reduction in uncertainty (Child and Faulkner,

1998). However, because of the potential problems that may be created by afailure to achieve inter-organisational cultural alignment, some organisationsmay be deterred from attempting to establish partnership arrangements.

The phrase safety culture came to prominence following a number of majoraccidents in the late 1980s; in particular, the Chernobyl nuclear accident inRussia, in 1986, the Piper Alpha oilrig explosion and fire in the North Sea, in1988, and the Clapham Junction train crash in London, in 1988. The UKAdvisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (ACSNI, 1993)provided a definition of safety culture as:

The product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and

patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an

organisation's health and safety management.

This definition appeared to link safety culture very strongly to human factorsand overlooked the contribution that physical and management controls had onan organisation's safety culture. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) lateradopted the ACSNI definition of safety culture but added that:

Organisations with a positive safety culture are characterised by communications founded on

mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety and by confidence in the

efficacy of preventive measures (Health and Safety Executive, 2000).


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The HSE therefore recognised the important influence that physical andmanagement risk control measures have on an organisation's safety culture.Fleming (2001) also acknowledged that in measuring the maturity of anorganisation's safety culture:

Cultural or behavioural approaches to safety improvement are at their most effective whenthe technical and systems aspects of safety are performing adequately and the majority ofaccidents appear to be due to behavioural or cultural factors.

Therefore, if it is necessary for these precursors to be in place before thematurity of a safety culture is worth measuring, these issues must themselvesclearly form a strong element of an organisation's safety culture. This view isfurther supported by the definition of safety culture offered by Toft andReynolds (1999):

Safety culture can be defined as those sets of norms, roles, beliefs, attitudes and social andtechnical practices within an organisation which are concerned with minimising the exposure

of individuals to conditions considered to be dangerous.

While safety culture can be viewed as an organisation's long-term experiencesand practices, safety climate is viewed as the current variations or nuances ofthe long-term culture. Safety climate has therefore been described as thetangible outputs of an organisation's health and safety culture, as perceived byindividuals or work groups, at some point in time (Davies et al., 2001). Ingeneral, therefore, a company may have, or aspire to have, an overall healthand safety culture with specific attributes, but, underlying this, there will be arange of health and safety climates that may vary, for example, betweengroups of people and locations as well as over time. Safety climate is typically

assessed in organisations through the application of employee questionnaireswith responses often interpreted by factor analysis and structural equationmodelling (Mearns et al., 1997; Davies et al., 2001). Child and Faulkner (1998)have advocated that the partners in alliance agreements should assess theirindividual organisational cultures and build these into the managementsystems for the co-operative ventures. In this respect, the potential benefitsoffered by the benchmarking process for the assessment of safety climates andthe identification of good/best practices, during this stage, have not beenrealised.

Since the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, considerable interest has taken placein safety climates within the UK offshore oil and gas industry. The Health and

Safety Executive (1996), for example, identified the four key areas, which theyconsidered contributed to the creation of a positive safety culture in thisindustry, as control, competence, co-operation and communication. Davies et al.(2001), who reviewed six safety climate questionnaires that had been developedin the UK for this sector, identified 11 core sets of statements that reflectedsimilar issues to those presented by the HSE together with issues related tocommitment and personal and management responsibilities. Mearns et al.(1997) compared safety climates for employees, in the UK and the Norwegiansectors of the North Sea offshore oil industry. Although the results showed that


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UK and Norwegian respondents had differing attitudes and perceptions for arange of physical, social and organisational issues, factor analysis andstructural equation modelling showed that the same safety climate modelscould be applied to both groups of employees.

There have been important concerns expressed about the adoption, use andpervading nature of the term safety culture within organisations. It has beenclaimed, for example, that safety culture is little more than a manipulativemanagement tool to control the actions and beliefs of the workforce (Back andWoolfson, 1999). Clearly, if this is the case, it must be questioned whether suchan approach to health and safety management is justifiable, particularly in thecontext of partnership agreements. Back and Woolfson (1999) also argued thatthe introduction of a specified safety culture could, in reality, be self-defeatingin its aim of achieving improved safety performance because:

Culture, far from facilitating free and open communication between the top and bottom of the

hierarchy, can actively impede the collective articulation of the view from below.

Whyte (1998) has also been very critical of what he referred to as ``official''research into offshore safety in the UK:

By controlling funding and gatekeeping functions, the HSE and the oil companies are able to

influence ``objective'' academic research. The result is a body of officially sanctioned researchinto offshore safety that is, in the opinion of this author, uncritical and benign and tends to

promote the broader interests of the oil companies.

Whyte (1998) claimed, in particular, that management victimisation andintimidation of the workforce had continued and this prevented a positiveapproach to health and safety management in the offshore sector.

Bresnen and Marshall (2000) considered that debates about partnering havebeen mainly prescriptive with little quantified evidence available to support thediscussions. In particular, they drew attention to the fact that little research hadaddressed the issue of changing attitudes and culture amongst partners, eventhough these were considered to be important issues. This case studyaddresses these issues and reports the results from a safety climate survey in aUK offshore oil company operating contractor partnership agreements in theNorth Sea. The main aim of the study was to benchmark the levels ofemployees' and contractors' safety climates in order to assess to what extentcultural alignment had been achieved as a result of good practice health and

safety management systems. The outcomes from the survey are discussed interms of employees' and contractors' perceptions of the organisation's healthand safety philosophy, approach to safety management and operationalconditions within their work environment. Secondary aims of the study were totest whether some of the concerns, which have been expressed by Whyte (1998)and Back and Woolfson (1999), about safety climate were valid, as these couldhave a significant impact on the success of partnership agreements. In thiscontext, it should be noted that access to the contractors and employees, whotook part in the survey, was not controlled or influenced by the HSE or the


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operating company and neither the HSE nor the operating company were in aposition to influence the conclusions reached and presented here.

Organisational setting

The programme was implemented within a UK offshore exploration andproduction division of an international oil company, operating in the North Sea.The company operated alliance/partnership agreements with a wide range ofcontractors, who provided operational support services for both onshore andoffshore activities. The total number of employees and contractors working atthe individual locations varied with time, as a consequence of the changingoperational status of each facility. However, it was estimated that, at the time ofthe survey, 800 employees and contractors worked on the three productionplatforms, two drilling rigs and the onshore technical and administrativesupport facility included within the assessment.

The established health and safety management system, which was based onthe Health and Safety Executive's guidelines for good management (Health andSafety Executive, 2000), incorporated the elements of policy, organisation,planning, implementation, monitoring and review. The company's publishedpolicy was to operate with common standards of health and safetymanagement for employees and contractors. The company, whichimplemented the USA Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)standards, recorded and reported both employee and contractor cases of work-based injury and ill-health. In the company's total worldwide oil explorationand production activities, the ` days away from work case frequency per200,000 hours (DAFWCF)'' were 0.16 for employees and 0.29 for contractors.These values compared to the company's DAFWCF figures, for all activities, of0.16 for employees and 0.26 for contractors. As part of a strong desire toachieve worldwide best practice in health and safety management, theorganisation was committed to consulting with, listening to and responding tostakeholders' views on health and safety management.

MethodologyA holistic approach was adopted in the survey in order to assess views onphysical and management issues as well as those related to human factors. Thesurvey therefore included those factors that have been recognised asinfluencing safety climates in offshore organisations (Health and Safety

Executive, 1996; Davies et al., 2001) but this information was supplemented bythe collection of views on additional specific operational issues.

Questionnaire structureThe questionnaire contained questions and statements relating to the followingissues:

(1) Demographics: identified by the respondent's working location,employment status, work function, operational level and offshoreexperience.


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(2) Safety management: categorised by 21 statements within sevencomposite measures, which represented the respondents' views oncontrol, communication, competence, co-operation, commitment andpersonal and management responsibilities for health and safety; see

Table I.Responses to these statements were made against a five-point Likert

scale covering the range of views from strongly agree (1), agree (2),neither agree nor disagree (3), disagree (4) and strongly disagree (5). Inorder to minimise the possibility that responses were biased, thesequence of statements was randomised and statements were framed inpositive and negative formats with expectations of both positive andnegative responses from respondents that worked in an organisationexhibiting a strong safety culture.

(3) Working conditions: semi-structured interviews were used in order to

elicit representative views and concerns over health and safety from asample of the division's safety and operational managers during

Table I.Statements used toelicit respondents'views on health andsafety management

Management area Item number and issue addressed

Control 1. Clear procedures are available for safety issues2. Work activities are never completed without the necessary

safety equipment3. When work practices are changed, health and safety is always

consideredCommunication 4. Management sets a good example over safety matters

5. I receive information on health and safety performance

6. Management keeps employees informed about health and safetyissuesCompetence 7. I am confident that I am made aware of work hazards

8. Health and safety training is given a high priority9. People responsible for my safety are competent

Co-operation 10. I am encouraged to make suggestions to improve safety11. My manager is always ready to listen to my concerns about

health and safety12. Health and safety representatives make an important

contribution to safetyCommitment 13. Safety is a management priority

14. Management insists that all unsafe situations are reported15. The company is committed to high standards of health and

safetyPersonalresponsibility

16. The permit to work system is sometimes by-passed

17. Work conditions sometimes make it difficult to work safely18. I sometimes take risks to get the job completed on time

Managementresponsibility

19. Management ensures that I am fully aware of health and safetystandards

20. Management checks that safe working procedures areimplemented

21. Management corrects unsafe working conditions


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onshore face-to-face meetings. The views of a representative sample ofoffshore operators were obtained through semi-structured interviewsusing group conferencing facilities, while the operators were workingoffshore. Following these discussions, a number of health and safety

issues, which were of concern to the workforce and management, wereidentified and incorporated within the questionnaire as four compositemeasures.

. operations made up of five statements that were related to howrespondents viewed the level of experience of offshore personnel,workplace noise levels, the practice of over-riding emergencyshutdown systems, standards of work control during shutdownsand the condition of operational equipment;

. management close out of safety actions made up of two statementsthat were related to how respondents considered that management

closed out short-term and long-term safety actions that had beenraised by the workforce;

. accident and incident reporting made up of three statements thatwere related to how respondents viewed reporting of accidents andincidents in terms of letting their own work team down, contributingto a safer work environment and whether other team members wereas concerned about workplace safety as the respondent;

. corporate health and safety philosophy made up of two statementsthat were related to how respondents believed the company feltabout the importance of health and safety.

Responses to each of the 12 statements included within the fourmeasures were rated on a five-point scale from strongly positive (1) tostrongly negative (5) support. Again, in order to minimise the possibilitythat responses were biased, the statements were framed in positive andnegative formats with expectations of both positive and negativeresponses.

(4) Comparisons with other offshore oil companies: respondents wererequested to compare how well they considered the organisationcompared with other offshore oil companies operating in the North Sea,

in terms of health and safety training, procedures and performance.Responses were rated on a five-point scale from much better (1) to muchworse (5).

Questionnaire implementationA safety group, which included employees and contractors, reviewed a draft ofthe questionnaire and provided feedback before the content and structure of thequestionnaire were finalised. Eight hundred questionnaires were distributed toemployees and contractors, together with a letter describing the purpose of the


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programme and a reply paid envelope addressed to the authors as externalfacilitators of the survey. The letter explained the background to theprogramme, how the content of the questionnaire had been developed, theindependent position of the external facilitators, the confidentiality of the

responses and the contribution that each person could make to the company'sfuture safety performance by taking part in the survey.

Data analysisFor analysis purposes, responses to some assessment scales were reversed inorder to provide a uni-directional consistency of response and to ensure that alow score consistently represented a positive view and a high score representeda negative view of the question or statement. All statistical analyses werecarried out using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS v.9.0) forWindows; statistical significance was accepted at the p < 0.05 level. A two-sample t-test was used to compare responses from employees and contractorsfor the 11 composite measures of safety management and working conditions,which were used to assess the organisation's safety climate, and for the threestatements comparing the company with other offshore oil companies.Responses to the 21 statements on health and safety management weresubjected to exploratory, principal components, factor analysis usingorthogonal rotation of factors in order to identify the underlying dimensions ofthe statements (Bryman and Cramer, 1997). Missing values were excluded listwise in the analysis and Cronbach values were used as a measure of theinternal scale consistency of the identified health and safety managementfactors (Bryman and Cramer, 1997). Structural equation modelling and path

analysis (Bryman and Cramer, 1997) were used on the three safetymanagement factors identified, the measure of respondents' beliefs in thecorporate health and safety philosophy and their perceptions of management'sclose out of health and safety actions in order to test possible relationshipsamong these variables and to identify any differences between the issuescontributing to contractors' and employees' safety climates.

Average scores, for the seven measures of safety management, fourmeasures of working conditions and three comparisons with other companies,were calculated for offshore/onshore, employees/contractors. The differencesbetween the average scores for offshore contractors and onshore employeesand for offshore employees and onshore contractors, for each of these 14

measures, were plotted on a grid in order to demonstrate divergences in thesafety climates for work environment and employment status.

Analysis and results of the surveyDemographic dataA total of 317 responses to the questionnaire were received. Because of theuncertainty over the exact number of employees and contractors working ateach location during the period of the survey, this represented an overallresponse rate to the 800 questionnaires distributed of 39.6 per cent. Of these


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respondents, 46.1 per cent were identified as employees, 51.1 per cent ascontractors, 21.2 per cent as onshore workers and 77.9 per cent as offshoreworkers. A summary of the employment status/work location of therespondents is shown in Table II and a summary of the work function/operational level of the respondents is shown in Table III.

In terms of offshore work experience, 91.7 per cent of contractors and 95.9per cent of employees based offshore reported that they had completed three ormore offshore tours of duties at their present work locations.

Safety managementThe mean and standard deviation scores relating to the 21 statements on safetymanagement are shown in Table IV. Factor analysis identified three factors,which together accounted for 47.3 per cent of the variance in the data,representing views on the working environment, management safety

standards and management commitment. The factor loadings for each item,which are also shown in Table IV, were all greater than 0.4 and statisticallysignificant. Cronbach values for these three factors were 0.82, 0.82 and 0.63respectively.

The mean and standard deviation scores for the seven measures of safetymanagement are shown, for employees and contractors, in Table V. There wereno significant differences between the responses of these two groups.

The responses for the seven composite measures of safety management werefurther split into onshore/offshore, employee/contractor groups and thedifferences in scores, between the offshore contractors and onshore employees

Table Distribution

respondents asfunction of th

employment status awork locati

Employment Work location (%)status Offshore Onshore Not identified Total

Employees 30.6 15.5 0 46.1Contractors 45.7 5.4 0 51.1Not identified 1.6 0.3 0.9 2.8Total 77.9 21.2 0.9 100.0

Note: n = 317

Table IDistribution

respondents asfunction of their wo

function aoperational lev

Operational level (%)

Work function Manager/supervisor Other Not identified Total

Operations/maintenance 36.6 29.3 0.6 66.6Support services 13.2 18.0 1.3 32.5Not identified 0 0.3 0.6 0.9Total 49.8 47.6 2.5 100.0

Note: n = 317


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and the offshore employees and onshore contractors, were plotted on anoffshore/onshore and employee/contractor grid; see Figure 1.

Working conditionsThe mean and standard deviation scores for the four composite measures ofworking conditions are shown, for contractors and employees, in Table V.There were no significant differences between the responses of these twogroups for the close out of safety actions and the belief in the corporatephilosophy for health and safety but there were significant differences in theresponses for operations and accident/incident reporting. The responses for thefour measures of working conditions were further split into onshore/offshore,employee/contractor groups and the differences in scores, between the offshore

contractors and onshore employees and the offshore employees and onshorecontractors, were plotted on an offshore/onshore and employee/contractor grid;see Figure 1.

Comparisons with other offshore oil companiesThe mean and standard deviation scores for the three statements are included,for employees and contractors, within Table V. There were no significantdifferences between the responses of these two groups. The responses for thethree measures of comparison were further split into onshore/offshore,

Table IV.Responses and factorloadings for the three-factor model describingthe respondents' viewson health and safetymanagement

Response FactorItem number Average St. dev. 1 2 3

18 1.93 0.93 0.70

21 1.90 0.78 0.6817 1.89 0.79 0.6613 1.73 0.80 0.60

5 1.91 0.74 0.5711 1.75 0.67 0.5516 1.81 0.96 0.53

1 1.69 0.63 0.512 2.14 0.97 0.47

15 1.68 0.64 0.7314 1.76 0.70 0.6612 2.14 0.80 0.6419 1.64 0.60 0.59 0.45

6 1.84 0.70 0.598 1.90 0.91 0.56

10 1.66 0.66 0.52 0.424 1.88 0.71 0.40 0.44 0.43

7 1.88 0.67 0.7220 2.11 0.86 0.71

3 2.05 0.72 0.459 1.82 0.61 0.41 0.43


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employee/contractor groups and the differences in scores, between the offshore

contractors and onshore employees and the offshore employees and onshorecontractors, were plotted on an offshore/onshore and employee/contractor grid;see Figure 2.

DiscussionThe main aim of the research was to compare and benchmark the safetyclimates existing amongst employees and partnering contractors working inthe same onshore/offshore environment in order to assess the extent of culturalalignment. The oil company studied in this project had five main businesspolicies, one of which related to health and safety management. Within the

health and safety management policy, there were 13 corporate objectives, oneof which specifically related to working with contractors and this identified thenecessity for contractors' health and safety management systems to be alignedwith that of the oil company. It was anticipated, therefore, that with compatiblehealth and safety management systems, there would also be compatible safetyclimates among the partnering organisations.

The overall response rate to the questionnaire ( 39.6 per cent) was almostidentical to that reported by Mearns et al. (1997), for the UK sector, in theirstudy of safety climates in the UK and Norwegian production facilities of a

Table Amalgamat

responses to issurelated to the worki

conditions femployees a

contracto

Employees ContractorsIssue Average St. dev. Average St. dev.

Safety management

Control 2.00 0.84 1.91 0.78Communication 1.86 0.71 1.89 0.73Competence 1.85 0.70 1.89 0.78Co-operation 1.86 0.77 1.84 0.72Commitment 1.73 0.75 1.72 0.68Personalresponsibility 1.95 0.93 1.81 0.85Managementresponsibility 1.90 0.77 1.86 0.77

Working conditionsOperations 2.88 1.51 3.65 1.35Close out of

safety actions 2.39 0.95 2.23 0.97Accident/incidentreporting 1.59 0.89 1.83 1.14Corporatephilosophy 1.39 0.82 1.31 0.77

Comparisons with other companiesTraining 2.45 0.95 2.36 1.13Procedures 2.26 0.81 2.32 1.09Performance 2.22 0.91 2.33 1.08


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number of North Sea oil fields (40 per cent). The proportions of employee,contractor, management and non-management respondents were very similar,

although the proportion of offshore respondents (77.9 per cent) wassignificantly higher than that of onshore respondents (21.2 per cent).

The average results obtained for the seven composite measures of safetymanagement were 2.00 (Table V) and there were no significant differences in

the values of these measures between employees and contractors. Theseresponses therefore indicated that employees and contractors held similar,

positive views about the organisation's health and safety management system.Of particular interest was the closeness in employees' and contractors'

responses for the measures of communication, co-operation and commitment,which have been identified as key issues for the success of partnership

agreements (Child and Faulkner, 1998; Bresnen and Marshall, 2000). Thecloseness of the positive values obtained from employees and contractors, forthe measure on communication, also indicated that the concern expressed by

Back and Woolfson (1999) that attempting to create a specified culture within

Figure 1.Benchmarking theimpact of offshore/onshore and contractor/employee status onsafety climate


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an organisation could impede communication was not supported within this

study.

Employees and contractors were split in their views on the four issues that

were related to working conditions. Accident/incident reporting and the belief

in the corporate philosophy of health and safety management were generally

more positive ( 1.83) than the views expressed about safety managementissues and these demonstrated a confidence in the organisation's commitment

to managing health and safety. The views expressed on the close out of safety

actions and operational issues, however, were less positive (2.2-3.65) and this

presented some concerns about the day-to-day management of safety issues.

Contractors were significantly more negative in their views about operational

issues (3.65) and accident /incident reporting (1.83) than employees (2.88 and

1.59, respectively). The contractors' more negative views about these two

Figure Benchmarking offsho

onshore and contractoemployee views of torganisation's trainin

procedures aperforman


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issues may reflect their wider knowledge of conditions experienced in otheroffshore companies.

In order to provide a benchmark for safety climate across work location andemployment status, the difference scores between offshore contractors and

onshore employees and between offshore employees and onshore contractors,for the 11 composite measures, were plotted on an offshore/onshore, employee/contractor grid, Figure 1. The scales on the grid represent how far the views ofrespondents, in each of the work location employment status groups, are froma position of commonality. The three superimposed benchmark circles identifylevels of divergence of 0.5 (10 per cent), 1.0 (20 per cent) and 2.0 (40 per cent)scale assessment units. The grid sector in which data points appear indicatesthat the group represented by this sector has a more negative view about theissue than the other groups. This approach, therefore, provides not only anoverall visual indication of the level of commonality of safety climates but alsohow the individual elements of work location and employment status impact onsafety climate. This novel method of benchmark data presentation isparticularly useful because it also highlights those metrics where there arelarge differences in value between the groups being compared. Although therewas a tendency for employees to be less positive than contractors, the resultsshowed that all seven of the safety management and two of the workingconditions measures fell within the 10 per cent benchmark circle. The measurerelated to management's close out of safety actions fell between the 10 and 20per cent benchmark circles and its position on the grid indicated that onshoreemployees had a more negative view than the other groups. The measurerelated to operations fell in the offshore contractor sector between the 20 and 40

per cent benchmark circles and this indicated that this group had a much morenegative view of operational issues compared to the other groups. In the lattercase, the large differences in value may result from a perception by offshorecontractors that the company was more concerned about correcting health andsafety issues that affected their own employees.

While very similar results were obtained for employees and contractors,over the range of perceptions and attitudes to health and safety issues, thiscontrasted with the results obtained Mearns et al. (1997), who recordedsignificant differences between employees in the UK and Norwegian offshoreareas of the North Sea. This difference supports the view of Child and Faulkner(1998) that national cultures, which are deeper rooted than organisational

cultures, are more resistant to change. However, although national culturesmay be more difficult to change, this does not rule out the potential forsuccessful international partnership alignments, as it merely indicates thatgreater effort may be required by the partners in order to achieve culturalalignment.

Factor analysis identified three factors that described the underlyingresponses to the 21 individual statements on safety management. These factorswere described as relating to the working environment, management safetystandards and management commitment. Structural equation modelling is a


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useful technique for testing causal relationships between respondents' views ona range of issues, whilst path analysis enables the strength and significance ofthe relationships in these models to be tested. The ACSNI (1993) and Healthand Safety Executive (2000) definitions of safety culture highlight its

dependence on individuals' perceptions of the organisation's commitment toand level of importance placed on health and safety issues. The safety climatemodel tested therefore incorporated these issues by assessing how respondents'belief in the organisation's stated philosophy for health and safety was defined.It may be anticipated that this belief might be influenced by respondents'perceptions of safety within their working environment (Factor 1) and theefficiency with which management closed out the health and safety actionsraised by the workforce. Respondents' views of the safety of the workenvironment and the efficiency of management's close out of safety actionsmay, in turn, be dependent on management's safety standards (Factor 2) and

management's commitment (Factor 3) towards health and safety. Figures 3 and4 illustrate this causal model and present the path coefficients calculated forsignificant relationships between these variables for employees andcontractors, respectively.

For employees, the belief in the corporate health and safety philosophy wasmore dependent on their views of the working environment than their views onthe close out of safety actions; whereas, for contractors, their views onmanagement's close out of safety actions had the greater influence. For bothemployees and contractors, their perceptions of the working environment weredependent on their views on those factors representing management's safetystandards and commitment. For employees, views on the close out of safety

actions were dependent on the factor representing management's commitment;whereas, for contractors, views were dependent on the factor representingmanagement's safety standards. The application of factor analysis andstructural equation modelling to the benchmarking process added a furtherdimension to the assessment and this enabled additional comparisons to bemade and identified those management issues that were particularly importantin defining employees' and contractors' safety climates. The results obtained

Figure Model illustrating t

factors influenciemployees' belief in t

organisation's safecultu


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indicated that the proposed model was equally applicable for employees andcontractors and the details only differed in terms of the relative importance orinfluence of the individual elements within the model. This provided additionalsupport for the attainment of a common safety climate across employee andcontractor groups in this organisation and the absence of potentiallydisruptive, polarised viewpoints.

Although employees and contractors had indicated positive views about thecompany's safety management and working conditions, neither group felt thatthe company was significantly better, or worse, than other offshore oilcompanies operating in the North Sea for health and safety training, proceduresand performance (Table V). Although, all three measures of comparison fellwithin the 10 per cent benchmark circle, there was a tendency for offshoreworkers to be more negative than onshore workers (Figure 2).

In addition to the comparison made between the safety climate forcontractors and employees, three specific issues, which had been raised byWhyte, were addressed in the questionnaire because of the potential impactthat these might have on an organisation's safety climate and the success ofpartnership agreements. Whyte (1998) claimed: ``Not least of these problems isthe way in which workers are discouraged from raising safety concerns . . .''.However, statement 10 ``I am encouraged to make suggestions to improvesafety'' produced the second most positive score (1.66) from respondents, see

Table IV. Therefore, respondents in this organisation felt very confident aboutmaking safety suggestions and this view was supported by the positiveresponse (1.75) received for statement 11, which was related to management'swillingness to listen to concerns over health and safety. Whyte (1998) reportedthat: ` . . . in many situations, workers report that management are notprimarily concerned with improving safety, but are preoccupied with keepingaccident figures down''. Statement 14 ``Management insists that all unsafesituations are reported'' produced a positive score of 1.76 from respondents;see Table IV. This indicated that respondents were generally confident of the

Figure 4.Model illustrating thefactors influencingcontractors' belief in theorganisation's safetyculture


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climate

42

management's desire to receive information about incidents and this was

supported by the respondents' positive response (1.73) for statement 13, which

was related to the priority given to health and safety by management. Finally,

Whyte (1998) strongly questioned whether offshore safety representatives

could make a significant contribution to offshore safety because:

``Approximately half of those in this survey reported that they did not bother to

raise safety concerns with their safety representatives because nothing will getdone or because nobody listens to what they say''. Statement 12 ``Health and

safety representatives make an important contribution'', produced the least

positive score (2.14) from respondents for any statement, see Table IV. While

this still represents a positive response, it does identify an issue that may be

worthy of further study.

Conclusions

Bresnen and Marshall (2000) and Child and Faulkner (1998) have discussed andemphasised the importance of measuring and comparing cultures in partnering

organisations in order to achieve cultural alignment. The Department of Trade

and Industry (2000) claimed that a sound culture brings harmony to partnering

organisations because all employees felt respected, gave of their best and felt

confident and optimistic. In this study, employees and contractors exhibited a

similar, positive safety climate, which may be attributable to the clear

guidelines that had been established by the organisation for contractor

alliances, as part of their health and safety management system. While the

organisational commitment and resources required to achieve this should not

be underestimated, there is clearly a positive indication that safety climates canbe aligned successfully across organisations that operate partnership

agreements within recognised health and safety management systems. The

concerns expressed by Whyte (1998) over offshore safety climate, such as areluctance to report unsafe work conditions and to make suggestions for safety

improvements, were not encountered in this study. It was considered therefore

that these issues were unlikely to impact on the success of partnershipagreements in organisations where well-managed health and safety

management systems had been established.

The results obtained demonstrated that safety climates could be

benchmarked in an offshore operational environment that utilised partnershipagreements. This approach may therefore be appropriate for benchmarking

safety climates before and after partnership arrangements have been

established in order to determine the level of cultural alignment that has been

achieved. It is suggested that similar approaches could be adopted for

benchmarking organisational cultures in other work environments.

Note

1. www.oil-gas-safety.org.uk


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430

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