The research register for this journal is available at http://www.mcbup.

com/research_registers

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com/ft

A case study in the offshore oil industry

Health and Safety Group, Scarman Centre, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Keywords Benchmarking, Health and safety, Partnering, Contracting out Abstract Partnership arrangements in industry have increased in interest because of the perceived business benefits that these alliances can bring to organisations. However, it has been claimed that it is important to align organisational cultures in order that these partnership arrangements are successful. This case study reports a benchmark assessment of employee and contractor safety climates in an offshore oil company that operated contractor partnership agreements in the North Sea. The study used a questionnaire in order to assess safety climates in terms of employees' and contractors' perceptions of safety management, workplace conditions and safety concerns. Factor analysis and structural equation modelling were used to support the benchmark study in order to compare the employees' and contractors' beliefs in the organisation's health and safety philosophy. The results obtained indicated that safety climates could be aligned in organisations that operate partnership agreements within a recognised health and safety management system. It is suggested that the approach presented is 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.

Benchmarking the safety climates of employees and contractors working within a partnership arrangement
Colin W. Fuller and Luise H. Vassie

Benchmarking the safety climates 413

Introduction Most 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 illhealth statistics may provide a useful guide for indicating those areas where an organisation's main risks exist, it should always be remembered that the absence of accidents and ill-health in operational areas, especially those involving 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

Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 8 No. 5, 2001, pp. 413-430. # MCB University Press, 1463-5771

BIJ 8,5

414

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 in industry because of the perceived benefits that alliances can bring to organisations (Department of Trade and Industry, 2000). Partnership arrangements are aimed, primarily, at achieving separate but complementary objectives within the participating organisations through collaborative approaches that involve a commitment from the parties to co-operate. The potential for partnership arrangements to create improvements in the collaborating organisations' health and safety performances has long been recognised and there have been a number of industry initiatives that address this issue. For example, the Responsible Care Programme operated by the Chemical Industries Association (2001) and the Step Change in Safety Programme operated as a cross-industry initiative of the UK oil and gas industry[1] both encourage partnership arrangements as part of a continuous improvement ethos in health and safety management. Bresnen and Marshall (2000) claimed that much of the published literature on the benefits of partnership arrangements presumed that cultural alignment between the partners was a necessary pre-requisite for their success. This alignment was considered to be important for generating mutual understanding and cooperation between the partners because significant differences in culture, which are brought about by polarised views, may create conflict. Commonality of culture creates common reference points, common ways of interpreting information and situations and a reduction in uncertainty (Child and Faulkner, 1998). However, because of the potential problems that may be created by a failure to achieve inter-organisational cultural alignment, some organisations may be deterred from attempting to establish partnership arrangements. The phrase safety culture came to prominence following a number of major accidents in the late 1980s; in particular, the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Russia, in 1986, the Piper Alpha oilrig explosion and fire in the North Sea, in 1988, and the Clapham Junction train crash in London, in 1988. The UK Advisory 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 factors and overlooked the contribution that physical and management controls had on an organisation's safety culture. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) later adopted 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).

The HSE therefore recognised the important influence that physical and management risk control measures have on an organisation's safety culture. Fleming (2001) also acknowledged that in measuring the maturity of an organisation's safety culture:
Cultural or behavioural approaches to safety improvement are at their most effective when the technical and systems aspects of safety are performing adequately and the majority of accidents appear to be due to behavioural or cultural factors.

Benchmarking the safety climates 415

Therefore, if it is necessary for these precursors to be in place before the maturity of a safety culture is worth measuring, these issues must themselves clearly form a strong element of an organisation's safety culture. This view is further supported by the definition of safety culture offered by Toft and Reynolds (1999):
Safety culture can be defined as those sets of norms, roles, beliefs, attitudes and social and technical 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 experiences and practices, safety climate is viewed as the current variations or nuances of the long-term culture. Safety climate has therefore been described as the tangible outputs of an organisation's health and safety culture, as perceived by individuals or work groups, at some point in time (Davies et al., 2001). In general, therefore, a company may have, or aspire to have, an overall health and safety culture with specific attributes, but, underlying this, there will be a range of health and safety climates that may vary, for example, between groups of people and locations as well as over time. Safety climate is typically assessed in organisations through the application of employee questionnaires with responses often interpreted by factor analysis and structural equation modelling (Mearns et al., 1997; Davies et al., 2001). Child and Faulkner (1998) have advocated that the partners in alliance agreements should assess their individual organisational cultures and build these into the management systems for the co-operative ventures. In this respect, the potential benefits offered by the benchmarking process for the assessment of safety climates and the identification of good/best practices, during this stage, have not been realised. Since the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, considerable interest has taken place in safety climates within the UK offshore oil and gas industry. The Health and Safety Executive (1996), for example, identified the four key areas, which they considered contributed to the creation of a positive safety culture in this industry, as control, competence, co-operation and communication. Davies et al. (2001), who reviewed six safety climate questionnaires that had been developed in the UK for this sector, identified 11 core sets of statements that reflected similar issues to those presented by the HSE together with issues related to commitment and personal and management responsibilities. Mearns et al. (1997) compared safety climates for employees, in the UK and the Norwegian sectors of the North Sea offshore oil industry. Although the results showed that

BIJ 8,5

416

UK and Norwegian respondents had differing attitudes and perceptions for a range of physical, social and organisational issues, factor analysis and structural equation modelling showed that the same safety climate models could be applied to both groups of employees. There have been important concerns expressed about the adoption, use and pervading nature of the term safety culture within organisations. It has been claimed, for example, that safety culture is little more than a manipulative management tool to control the actions and beliefs of the workforce (Back and Woolfson, 1999). Clearly, if this is the case, it must be questioned whether such an approach to health and safety management is justifiable, particularly in the context of partnership agreements. Back and Woolfson (1999) also argued that the introduction of a specified safety culture could, in reality, be self-defeating in 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 research into 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 and intimidation of the workforce had continued and this prevented a positive approach to health and safety management in the offshore sector. Bresnen and Marshall (2000) considered that debates about partnering have been mainly prescriptive with little quantified evidence available to support the discussions. In particular, they drew attention to the fact that little research had addressed the issue of changing attitudes and culture amongst partners, even though these were considered to be important issues. This case study addresses these issues and reports the results from a safety climate survey in a UK offshore oil company operating contractor partnership agreements in the North Sea. The main aim of the study was to benchmark the levels of employees' and contractors' safety climates in order to assess to what extent cultural alignment had been achieved as a result of good practice health and safety management systems. The outcomes from the survey are discussed in terms of employees' and contractors' perceptions of the organisation's health and safety philosophy, approach to safety management and operational conditions within their work environment. Secondary aims of the study were to test whether some of the concerns, which have been expressed by Whyte (1998) and Back and Woolfson (1999), about safety climate were valid, as these could have a significant impact on the success of partnership agreements. In this context, it should be noted that access to the contractors and employees, who took part in the survey, was not controlled or influenced by the HSE or the

operating company and neither the HSE nor the operating company were in a position to influence the conclusions reached and presented here. Organisational setting The programme was implemented within a UK offshore exploration and production division of an international oil company, operating in the North Sea. The company operated alliance/partnership agreements with a wide range of contractors, who provided operational support services for both onshore and offshore activities. The total number of employees and contractors working at the individual locations varied with time, as a consequence of the changing operational status of each facility. However, it was estimated that, at the time of the survey, 800 employees and contractors worked on the three production platforms, two drilling rigs and the onshore technical and administrative support facility included within the assessment. The established health and safety management system, which was based on the Health and Safety Executive's guidelines for good management (Health and Safety Executive, 2000), incorporated the elements of policy, organisation, planning, implementation, monitoring and review. The company's published policy was to operate with common standards of health and safety management for employees and contractors. The company, which implemented the USA Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards, recorded and reported both employee and contractor cases of workbased injury and ill-health. In the company's total worldwide oil exploration and production activities, the ``days away from work case frequency per 200,000 hours (DAFWCF)'' were 0.16 for employees and 0.29 for contractors. These values compared to the company's DAFWCF figures, for all activities, of 0.16 for employees and 0.26 for contractors. As part of a strong desire to achieve worldwide best practice in health and safety management, the organisation was committed to consulting with, listening to and responding to stakeholders' views on health and safety management. Methodology A holistic approach was adopted in the survey in order to assess views on physical and management issues as well as those related to human factors. The survey therefore included those factors that have been recognised as influencing safety climates in offshore organisations (Health and Safety Executive, 1996; Davies et al., 2001) but this information was supplemented by the collection of views on additional specific operational issues. Questionnaire structure The questionnaire contained questions and statements relating to the following issues: (1) Demographics: identified by the respondent's working location, employment status, work function, operational level and offshore experience.

Benchmarking the safety climates 417

BIJ 8,5

418

(2) Safety management: categorised by 21 statements within seven composite measures, which represented the respondents' views on control, communication, competence, co-operation, commitment and personal 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). In order to minimise the possibility that responses were biased, the sequence of statements was randomised and statements were framed in positive and negative formats with expectations of both positive and negative responses from respondents that worked in an organisation exhibiting 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 a sample of the division's safety and operational managers during
Management area Item number and issue addressed Control 1. Clear procedures are available for safety issues 2. Work activities are never completed without the necessary safety equipment 3. When work practices are changed, health and safety is always considered 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 safety issues 7. I am confident that I am made aware of work hazards 8. Health and safety training is given a high priority 9. People responsible for my safety are competent 10. I am encouraged to make suggestions to improve safety 11. My manager is always ready to listen to my concerns about health and safety 12. Health and safety representatives make an important contribution to safety 13. Safety is a management priority 14. Management insists that all unsafe situations are reported 15. The company is committed to high standards of health and safety 16. The permit to work system is sometimes by-passed 17. Work conditions sometimes make it difficult to work safely 18. I sometimes take risks to get the job completed on time 19. Management ensures that I am fully aware of health and safety standards 20. Management checks that safe working procedures are implemented 21. Management corrects unsafe working conditions

Communication

Competence Co-operation

Commitment

Personal responsibility Table I. Statements used to elicit respondents' views on health and safety management Management responsibility

onshore face-to-face meetings. The views of a representative sample of offshore operators were obtained through semi-structured interviews using group conferencing facilities, while the operators were working offshore. Following these discussions, a number of health and safety issues, which were of concern to the workforce and management, were identified and incorporated within the questionnaire as four composite measures. . operations made up of five statements that were related to how respondents viewed the level of experience of offshore personnel, workplace noise levels, the practice of over-riding emergency shutdown systems, standards of work control during shutdowns and the condition of operational equipment; . management close out of safety actions made up of two statements that were related to how respondents considered that management closed out short-term and long-term safety actions that had been raised by the workforce; . accident and incident reporting made up of three statements that were related to how respondents viewed reporting of accidents and incidents in terms of letting their own work team down, contributing to a safer work environment and whether other team members were as concerned about workplace safety as the respondent; . corporate health and safety philosophy made up of two statements that were related to how respondents believed the company felt about the importance of health and safety. Responses to each of the 12 statements included within the four measures were rated on a five-point scale from strongly positive (1) to strongly negative (5) support. Again, in order to minimise the possibility that responses were biased, the statements were framed in positive and negative formats with expectations of both positive and negative responses. (4) Comparisons with other offshore oil companies: respondents were requested to compare how well they considered the organisation compared 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 much worse (5). Questionnaire implementation A safety group, which included employees and contractors, reviewed a draft of the questionnaire and provided feedback before the content and structure of the questionnaire were finalised. Eight hundred questionnaires were distributed to employees and contractors, together with a letter describing the purpose of the

Benchmarking the safety climates 419

BIJ 8,5

420

programme and a reply paid envelope addressed to the authors as external facilitators of the survey. The letter explained the background to the programme, how the content of the questionnaire had been developed, the independent position of the external facilitators, the confidentiality of the responses and the contribution that each person could make to the company's future safety performance by taking part in the survey. Data analysis For analysis purposes, responses to some assessment scales were reversed in order to provide a uni-directional consistency of response and to ensure that a low score consistently represented a positive view and a high score represented a negative view of the question or statement. All statistical analyses were carried out using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS v.9.0) for Windows; statistical significance was accepted at the p < 0.05 level. A twosample t-test was used to compare responses from employees and contractors for the 11 composite measures of safety management and working conditions, which were used to assess the organisation's safety climate, and for the three statements comparing the company with other offshore oil companies. Responses to the 21 statements on health and safety management were subjected to exploratory, principal components, factor analysis using orthogonal rotation of factors in order to identify the underlying dimensions of the statements (Bryman and Cramer, 1997). Missing values were excluded list wise in the analysis and Cronbach  values were used as a measure of the internal scale consistency of the identified health and safety management factors (Bryman and Cramer, 1997). Structural equation modelling and path analysis (Bryman and Cramer, 1997) were used on the three safety management factors identified, the measure of respondents' beliefs in the corporate health and safety philosophy and their perceptions of management's close out of health and safety actions in order to test possible relationships among these variables and to identify any differences between the issues contributing to contractors' and employees' safety climates. Average scores, for the seven measures of safety management, four measures of working conditions and three comparisons with other companies, were calculated for offshore/onshore, employees/contractors. The differences between the average scores for offshore contractors and onshore employees and for offshore employees and onshore contractors, for each of these 14 measures, were plotted on a grid in order to demonstrate divergences in the safety climates for work environment and employment status. Analysis and results of the survey Demographic data A total of 317 responses to the questionnaire were received. Because of the uncertainty over the exact number of employees and contractors working at each location during the period of the survey, this represented an overall response rate to the 800 questionnaires distributed of  39.6 per cent. Of these

respondents, 46.1 per cent were identified as employees, 51.1 per cent as contractors, 21.2 per cent as onshore workers and 77.9 per cent as offshore workers. A summary of the employment status/work location of the respondents 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 95.9 per cent of employees based offshore reported that they had completed three or more offshore tours of duties at their present work locations. Safety management The mean and standard deviation scores relating to the 21 statements on safety management 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 statistically significant. Cronbach  values for these three factors were 0.82, 0.82 and 0.63 respectively. The mean and standard deviation scores for the seven measures of safety management are shown, for employees and contractors, in Table V. There were no significant differences between the responses of these two groups. The responses for the seven composite measures of safety management were further split into onshore/offshore, employee/contractor groups and the differences in scores, between the offshore contractors and onshore employees
Employment status Employees Contractors Not identified Total Note: n = 317 Offshore 30.6 45.7 1.6 77.9 Work location (%) Onshore Not identified 15.5 5.4 0.3 21.2 0 0 0.9 0.9 Total 46.1 51.1 2.8 100.0

Benchmarking the safety climates 421

Table II. Distribution of respondents as a function of their employment status and work location

Work function Operations/ maintenance Support services Not identified Total Note: n = 317

Manager/ supervisor 36.6 13.2 0 49.8

Operational level (%) Other 29.3 18.0 0.3 47.6 Not identified 0.6 1.3 0.6 2.5 Total 66.6 32.5 0.9 100.0 Table III. Distribution of respondents as a function of their work function and operational level

BIJ 8,5

Item number 18 21 17 13 5 11 16 1 2 15 14 12 19 6 8 10 4

Response Average St. dev. 1.93 1.90 1.89 1.73 1.91 1.75 1.81 1.69 2.14 1.68 1.76 2.14 1.64 1.84 1.90 1.66 1.88 1.88 2.11 2.05 1.82 0.93 0.78 0.79 0.80 0.74 0.67 0.96 0.63 0.97 0.64 0.70 0.80 0.60 0.70 0.91 0.66 0.71 0.67 0.86 0.72 0.61

1 0.70 0.68 0.66 0.60 0.57 0.55 0.53 0.51 0.47

Factor 2

422

Table IV. Responses and factor loadings for the threefactor model describing 7 the respondents' views 20 3 on health and safety 9 management

0.40

0.73 0.66 0.64 0.59 0.59 0.56 0.52 0.44

0.45 0.42 0.43 0.72 0.71 0.45 0.43

0.41

and the offshore employees and onshore contractors, were plotted on an offshore/onshore and employee/contractor grid; see Figure 1. Working conditions The mean and standard deviation scores for the four composite measures of working conditions are shown, for contractors and employees, in Table V. There were no significant differences between the responses of these two groups for the close out of safety actions and the belief in the corporate philosophy for health and safety but there were significant differences in the responses for operations and accident/incident reporting. The responses for the four 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 onshore contractors, were plotted on an offshore/onshore and employee/contractor grid; see Figure 1. Comparisons with other offshore oil companies The mean and standard deviation scores for the three statements are included, for employees and contractors, within Table V. There were no significant differences between the responses of these two groups. The responses for the three measures of comparison were further split into onshore/offshore,

Issue Safety management Control Communication Competence Co-operation Commitment Personal responsibility Management responsibility Working conditions Operations Close out of safety actions Accident/incident reporting Corporate philosophy

Employees Average St. dev. 2.00 1.86 1.85 1.86 1.73 1.95 1.90 2.88 2.39 1.59 1.39 0.84 0.71 0.70 0.77 0.75 0.93 0.77 1.51 0.95 0.89 0.82 0.95 0.81 0.91

Contractors Average St. dev. 1.91 1.89 1.89 1.84 1.72 1.81 1.86 3.65 2.23 1.83 1.31 2.36 2.32 2.33 0.78 0.73 0.78 0.72 0.68 0.85 0.77 1.35 0.97 1.14 0.77 1.13 1.09 1.08

Benchmarking the safety climates 423

Comparisons with other companies Training 2.45 Procedures 2.26 Performance 2.22

Table V. Amalgamated responses to issues related to the working conditions for employees and contractors

employee/contractor groups and the differences in scores, between the offshore contractors and onshore employees and the offshore employees and onshore contractors, were plotted on an offshore/onshore and employee/contractor grid; see Figure 2. Discussion The main aim of the research was to compare and benchmark the safety climates existing amongst employees and partnering contractors working in the same onshore/offshore environment in order to assess the extent of cultural alignment. The oil company studied in this project had five main business policies, one of which related to health and safety management. Within the health and safety management policy, there were 13 corporate objectives, one of which specifically related to working with contractors and this identified the necessity for contractors' health and safety management systems to be aligned with that of the oil company. It was anticipated, therefore, that with compatible health and safety management systems, there would also be compatible safety climates among the partnering organisations. The overall response rate to the questionnaire ( 39.6 per cent) was almost identical to that reported by Mearns et al. (1997), for the UK sector, in their study of safety climates in the UK and Norwegian production facilities of a

BIJ 8,5

424

Figure 1. Benchmarking the impact of offshore/ onshore and contractor/ employee status on safety climate

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) was significantly higher than that of onshore respondents (21.2 per cent). The average results obtained for the seven composite measures of safety management were  2.00 (Table V) and there were no significant differences in the values of these measures between employees and contractors. These responses 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). The closeness of the positive values obtained from employees and contractors, for the measure on communication, also indicated that the concern expressed by Back and Woolfson (1999) that attempting to create a specified culture within

Benchmarking the safety climates 425

Figure 2. Benchmarking offshore/ onshore and contractor/ employee views of the organisation's training, procedures and performance

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 management issues 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

BIJ 8,5

426

issues may reflect their wider knowledge of conditions experienced in other offshore companies. In order to provide a benchmark for safety climate across work location and employment 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 of respondents, in each of the work location employment status groups, are from a position of commonality. The three superimposed benchmark circles identify levels 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 indicates that the group represented by this sector has a more negative view about the issue than the other groups. This approach, therefore, provides not only an overall visual indication of the level of commonality of safety climates but also how the individual elements of work location and employment status impact on safety climate. This novel method of benchmark data presentation is particularly useful because it also highlights those metrics where there are large differences in value between the groups being compared. Although there was a tendency for employees to be less positive than contractors, the results showed that all seven of the safety management and two of the working conditions measures fell within the 10 per cent benchmark circle. The measure related to management's close out of safety actions fell between the 10 and 20 per cent benchmark circles and its position on the grid indicated that onshore employees had a more negative view than the other groups. The measure related 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 more negative view of operational issues compared to the other groups. In the latter case, the large differences in value may result from a perception by offshore contractors that the company was more concerned about correcting health and safety 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, this contrasted with the results obtained Mearns et al. (1997), who recorded significant differences between employees in the UK and Norwegian offshore areas 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 cultures may be more difficult to change, this does not rule out the potential for successful international partnership alignments, as it merely indicates that greater effort may be required by the partners in order to achieve cultural alignment. Factor analysis identified three factors that described the underlying responses to the 21 individual statements on safety management. These factors were described as relating to the working environment, management safety standards and management commitment. Structural equation modelling is a

useful technique for testing causal relationships between respondents' views on a range of issues, whilst path analysis enables the strength and significance of the relationships in these models to be tested. The ACSNI (1993) and Health and Safety Executive (2000) definitions of safety culture highlight its dependence on individuals' perceptions of the organisation's commitment to and level of importance placed on health and safety issues. The safety climate model 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 the efficiency with which management closed out the health and safety actions raised by the workforce. Respondents' views of the safety of the work environment and the efficiency of management's close out of safety actions may, in turn, be dependent on management's safety standards (Factor 2) and management's commitment (Factor 3) towards health and safety. Figures 3 and 4 illustrate this causal model and present the path coefficients calculated for significant relationships between these variables for employees and contractors, respectively. For employees, the belief in the corporate health and safety philosophy was more dependent on their views of the working environment than their views on the close out of safety actions; whereas, for contractors, their views on management's close out of safety actions had the greater influence. For both employees and contractors, their perceptions of the working environment were dependent on their views on those factors representing management's safety standards 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 representing management's safety standards. The application of factor analysis and structural equation modelling to the benchmarking process added a further dimension to the assessment and this enabled additional comparisons to be made and identified those management issues that were particularly important in defining employees' and contractors' safety climates. The results obtained

Benchmarking the safety climates 427

Figure 3. Model illustrating the factors influencing employees' belief in the organisation's safety culture

BIJ 8,5

428
Figure 4. Model illustrating the factors influencing contractors' belief in the organisation's safety culture

indicated that the proposed model was equally applicable for employees and contractors and the details only differed in terms of the relative importance or influence of the individual elements within the model. This provided additional support for the attainment of a common safety climate across employee and contractor groups in this organisation and the absence of potentially disruptive, polarised viewpoints. Although employees and contractors had indicated positive views about the company's safety management and working conditions, neither group felt that the company was significantly better, or worse, than other offshore oil companies operating in the North Sea for health and safety training, procedures and performance (Table V). Although, all three measures of comparison fell within the 10 per cent benchmark circle, there was a tendency for offshore workers to be more negative than onshore workers (Figure 2). In addition to the comparison made between the safety climate for contractors and employees, three specific issues, which had been raised by Whyte, were addressed in the questionnaire because of the potential impact that these might have on an organisation's safety climate and the success of partnership agreements. Whyte (1998) claimed: ``Not least of these problems is the way in which workers are discouraged from raising safety concerns . . .''. However, statement 10 ``I am encouraged to make suggestions to improve safety'' produced the second most positive score (1.66) from respondents, see Table IV. Therefore, respondents in this organisation felt very confident about making safety suggestions and this view was supported by the positive response (1.75) received for statement 11, which was related to management's willingness to listen to concerns over health and safety. Whyte (1998) reported that: ``. . . in many situations, workers report that management are not primarily concerned with improving safety, but are preoccupied with keeping accident figures down''. Statement 14 ``Management insists that all unsafe situations are reported'' produced a positive score of 1.76 from respondents; see Table IV. This indicated that respondents were generally confident of the

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 get done 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 and emphasised 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 can be 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 a reluctance 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 partnership agreements 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 partnership agreements. 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

Benchmarking the safety climates 429

BIJ 8,5

430

References ACSNI (1993) Third Report: Organising for Safety, Human Factors Study Group of the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations, HSE Books, Sudbury. Back, M. and Woolfson, C. (1999), ``Safety culture a concept too many?'', The Safety & Health Practitioner, January, pp. 14-16. Bryman, A. and Cramer, D. (1997), Quantitative Data Analysis with SPSS for Windows, Routledge, London. Bresnen, M. and Marshall, N. (2000), ``Partnering in construction: a critical review of issues, problems and dilemmas'', Construction Management and Economics, Vol. 18, pp. 229-37. Chemical Industries Association (2001) Responsible Care Programme, www.cia.org.uk (accessed 25 May, 2001). Child, J. and Faulkener, D. (1998), Strategies of Co-operation; Managing Alliances, Networks, and Joint Ventures, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Davies, F., Spencer, R. and Dooley, K. (2001), Summary Guide to Safety Climate Tools, HSE Books, Sudbury. Department of Trade and Industry (2000), Partnerships with People: A Practical Guide, Department of Trade and Industry, London. Fleming, M. (2001), Safety Culture Maturity Model, HSE Books, Sudbury. Fuller (1997), ``Key performance indicators for benchmarking health and safety management in intra- and inter-company comparisons'', Benchmarking for Quality Management & Technology, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 165-74. Fuller (1999), ``Benchmarking health and safety performance through company safety competitions'', Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 325-37. Health and Safety Executive (1996), How You Can Improve Health and Safety Offshore, IND(G)239L, HSE Books, Sudbury. Health and Safety Executive (2000), Successful Health and Safety Management, HSG65, HSE Books, Sudbury. Mearns, K., Rundmo, T., Flin, R., Fleming, M. and Gordon, R. (1997), A Comparative Study of Risk Perception and Safety in UK and Norwegian Offshore Personnel, HSE Information Services, Sheffield. Toft, B. and Reynolds, S. (1999), Learning from Disasters: A Management Approach, Perpetuity Press, Leicester. Vassie, L.H. (1998), ``A proactive team-based approach to continuous improvement in health and safety management'', Employee Relations, Vol. 20 No. 6, pp. 577-93. Whyte, D. (1998), ``Overcoming the fear factor: workforce involvement and health and safety offshore'', Public Money & Management, October-December, pp. 33-40.