The Hearts and Minds Program: Understanding HSE Culture

Abstract

The Hearts and Minds program is intended to move the basis for HSEperformance past the mechanical implementation of HSE Management Systems. Thispaper describes an evolutionary approach to HSE culture and reports on abrochure that enables organisations and individuals to understand the HSEculture and their personal behaviours in the context of the culture. The papergives examples of characterisations of organisational and personal behavioursand discusses how improvement can be generated and maintained inorganisations. Introduction Society requires increasingly high standards for Health, Safety andEnvironment in the Oil and Gas industry. Prior to the Piper Alpha disasterthere was an unstructured approach to improvement based upon trying to ensurethat commitment is turned into performance. The Piper Alpha disaster led to theobligatory development of safety management systems. Safety management, implemented in a systematic approach, has since been generalized to HSEManagement Systems (HSE-MS) as the skills required to implement such systemsimproved. The problem with all these approaches has always lain in theirtop-down nature; commitment at the top has to be driven down to ensure that theworkforce behaves safely and responsibly, both in their own interests, in theinterest of the organisation of the wider community of stakeholders. Despiterequirements made by regulatory bodies, real workforce involvement has oftenproven difficult in practice and continued management effort has been required. The implementation of HSE management systems has tended to be mechanical, setting and meeting minimal requirements, but not going further. The result hasbeen initial improvements in performance that has plateaued and has requiredradical new approaches to develop. The question is: How is further improvementpossible beyond HSE-MS? The answer appears to lie in the active and willinginvolvement of all concerned, going beyond the merely perfunctory to activeinvolvement. The Hearts and Minds program is intended to move the basis for effective HSEperformance past the mechanical implementation of HSE management systems andreliance upon top-down control of the workforce1. The original remitfor the research program was to create a workforce that is sufficiently wellmotivated to behave in safe and responsible ways without external control. Sucha workforce would be intrinsically motivated to act in ways that were safe, environmentally responsible and fundamentally healthy. This is a large andrather nebulous target, so it has been operationalised as the development of atrue culture of safety. Such a culture is one in which HSE is part of theself-image of all involved in the enterprise, from top to bottom. The Heartsand Minds Program has been aimed at the development of such a culture withinShell1. Organisational culture is not a simple concept2,3 and hastraditionally been notoriously difficult to define. Safety culture, with itslogical extension of an HSE culture, is equally hard to define. One concept, safety climate has been coined to cover the expectations and perceptions of theworkforce4, but the idea of a culture is one that only partiallyoverlaps with climate. Culture represents the unspoken, and often invisible, sets of beliefs and assumptions that everyone shares, climate refers to theexperience that must be tempered by the expectations5. Culturereflects "what we do round here" Climate reflects "How we feel about whathappens round here". We have found that measures of safety culture andreadiness to change, as a measure of the climate, are uncorrelated6, implying that climate refers to the extent to which current expectations aboutsafety are being met, but that such scores are independent of thoseexpectations. What might make a workforce happy in a Reactive culture (seebelow for the definitions), would be regarded as unsatisfactory in a Proactiveculture.

Nurses’ Perception of Patient Safety Culture in a Referral Hospital: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…We analyzed the dimensions concerning the frequency of reported events (management support and feedback and error reporting) based on an adaptation of the Westrum organizational development model [ 24 ] by Parker and Hudson [ 25 ] which was specifically designed to assess CS in organizations. Of the five phases or levels of organizational CS, the organization of our study population lay between the criteria of the first (pathological) phase and second (reactive) phase.…”

Accidents in “normal” operation – Can you see them coming?

“…but also with respect to safety risks. It seems that these constraints, which can be seen as the 'company's culture', has a great influence on the normal way of working in a company and largely determines the effectiveness of an SMS as shown too in the Hearts and Minds program (see web reference Hudson et al, 2002). For a large part, the difference between the distributions of affected safety barriers is based on these aforementioned issues.…”

“…Although these cultural indicators are accepted in practice and accepted by researchers as very relevant, hard evidence of any immediate correlation with safety was for a long time not proven (Sorensen, 2002). In recent years Shell with its 'Hearts and Minds' program developed by Hudson, Parker, & van der Graaf, 2002 has made good progress. Vice versa Hollnagel, Woods, and Leveson (2006) showed in recent years under the term 'Resilience engineering' how pressure in an organization to achieve efficiency improvement and cost cutting may over time lead to erosion of safety level.…”

Incident analysis in healthcare: an intergroup perspective

“…Aviation provides an example of how the blame culture has been mitigated through a human factors approach. While blame was a factor in the early days of the safety culture in aviation (Hudson, 2003), this changed over time due to the committed efforts to train staff in proactive safety behaviours (Hudson, Parker & van der Graaf, 2002) and human factors systems. This has resulted in aviation taking a mindful approach to danger and safety and showing initiatives around knowledge sharing and learning (Rijpma, 1997;Rochlin, 1993); traits consistent with those exemplified in high reliability organisations (HRO).…”