Process Safety Leadership: Three Key Findings from the Pilot Survey.
A limited trial of our Process Safety Leadership Survey threw up some immediate insight, but also some questions for the industry. Here are the areas to look out for when the full survey is launched on April 21st.
Step Change in Safety and Empirisys have teamed up to deliver a survey to assess the maturity of Process Safety Leadership across the Offshore Energy Industry which will be launched on April 21st to all of Step Change in Safety’s member companies. In November 2022, we initiated a trial survey to test the foundational concepts with some leaders in the field. We developed questions for eight themes, based on the eight core Principles of Process Safety.
Although the trial had limited questions and went out to only a small cohort, there were some key findings that we’ll be looking out for in the full survey.
1. A (Mostly) Positive Outlook
Each question in the trial was asked on a 7-point scale, from ‘Strongly Disagree’ to ‘Strongly Agree’. Simply averaging all the scores out (and converting to a percentage), we can find the overall average score across all respondents and for all themes.
A score of 62.7 is somewhere between “Neither Agree nor Disagree” and “Somewhat Agree” on the standard 7-point scale, so a mildly positive result overall. However, it’s also useful to look at the breakdown of different scores to see if there are some other trends.
Plotting all the scores for all questions on a chart with separate columns for each answer lets us see the distribution. On this scale, 100% is the most positive possible answer, whilst 0% is the most negative.
Immediately, you can see the answers skew to be generally more positive than negative, in fact the most commonly received answer was Agree. Over 10% of answers received were the most positive option, whilst less than 3% were the most negative option.
However, there’s also a dip either side of Agree. This could be because while there was general positivity, there weren’t strong feelings either way — not many repondents selected “Strongly Agree” which suggests some further work may be needed across the board.
All this indicates that attitudes towards process safety are relatively positive. In the full survey, we’re using a range of question types so that we can really explore industry patterns: keep an eye out for communications in the future talking more about our survey question design process.
2. Contrasting Themes
Below, the answers to the question from each theme are compared, giving us an initial glimpse into the industry perception of each process safety principle:
The highest average score was for the Theme ‘Sharing’, which encapsulates the Process Safety Leadership Principle: ‘Sharing Good Practice’. The questions in this theme aim to assess the extent that lessons and best practice are shared & implemented, internally and industry-wide.
This theme received an average score of 80%. This could suggest that best practices are accessible and that the industry is adept at sharing best practice. However, the lowest scoring themes, ‘Culture’ and ‘Competency’, may suggest a weakness with the widespread adoption and implementation of best practice. This initial observation shall be investigated in more detail in the full survey, where it will be possible to surface insight with more clarity.
3. A Lack of Consensus
Alongside average scores, an interesting metric to look at is the consensus amongst the answers received. Consensus, derived from answer score variability, can indicate where respondents had differing opinions towards a theme.
This diagram shows each theme, placed into a quadrant indicating the score, and the consensus of respondents. There is a strong consensus around the high scores received for the themes ‘Sharing’ and ‘Proactivity’ — these could be areas of strength in the industry if the pilot results hold true more widely. The most consensus amongst respondents was for the theme ‘Informing’ (with a relatively low score), whilst ‘Clarity’ was, ironically, the theme with the least clarity in response having a wide range of different answers. In the full survey, it will be possible to dig deeper into areas of discord through demographic breakdowns to identify behavioural and cultural patterns.
What’s next
The pilot survey gave us a brief taste of what is to come. For the full Process Safety Leadership Survey, we should be able to understand if the positive responses continue, whether Sharing and Proactivity remain at the top of the class (and Culture and Competency still need improvement) and whether consensus in themes and scores gets closer or further away with the addition of more questions and more participants.
We have designed the survey structure, survey content and analytical dashboard simultaneously. This has allowed us to create a bespoke analytical framework with a depth and breadth of questioning that is designed intentionally to surface actionable industrial insight. Over the next few weeks, our experts will discuss a range of topics related to this initiative: so keep an eye out for more information in the coming weeks.
If you found this useful, please let us know by getting in touch, give us a clap or follow. You can find out more about us at empirisys.io or on Twitter @empirisys. And you can drop us an e-mail at info@empirsys.io or directly to the author of this article, Morgan.walters@empirisys.io.
