The Human Factors of Process Safety and Worker Empowerment in the Offshore Oil Industry Proceedings of a Workshop (2018) / Chapter Skim
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3 Effective Worker Empowerment for Offshore Safety
3 Effective Worker Empowerment for Offshore Safety
Pages 23-30
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From page 23... ...
(Will) Very little has been published in peer-reviewed journals on empowerment and safety in the offshore oil industry, noted Rhona Flin, professor of industrial psychology, Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University, and Christiane Spitzmueller, professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Houston, who provided an overview of the research on worker empowerment that served as the research basis for their 23
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From page 24... ...
. An integrative model of safety climate: Linking psychological climate and work attitudes to individual safety outcomes using meta-analysis.
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behaviors in the offshore sector6,7 as well as research on empowerment from other sectors8,9 reveal many issues related to worker empowerment and safety, including worker engagement, participation, prioritization of safety over production, workplace culture, employee voice, job insecurity, and layoffs. These and other factors, she noted, can be combined into a framework that provides a way of analyzing the effects of both context and workplace conditions on worker empowerment and safety behaviors (see Figure 3-1)
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At the level of organizational management, Spitzmueller identified corporate culture, human resources systems, communication, peer support, and resources as predictors of worker empowerment. As a specific example, she cited a requirement that onshore managers spend a certain amount of time offshore as having the potential to exert a powerful effect on an organization.
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Similarly, she said, a feeling of psychological safety15 can benefit someone who is observing a job and wants to stop it because continuing appears to be too risky. Finally, Spitzmueller identified the safety behaviors and capabilities of empowered workers as including actively participating in safety activities, exercising stop-work authority, and reporting unsafe acts or violations of processes.
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THE PATH TO EMPOWERMENT Mick Will, president of Ragtop Consulting LLC, observed that many changes have occurred in the oil business over the 40 years of his career. When he started in the 1970s, he said, the reigning attitude was that "stuff happens in the oil field -- people get hurt, some people get hurt bad, there are some fatalities, it was pretty common." Then, he continued, safety professionals were hired who developed safety rules, although books on safe practices often were placed in gloveboxes or offshore lockers and not consulted.
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"It's got to be personal," he asserted. "It's got to be genuine." He added that implementing change takes resources at both the individual and team levels, and that resources are inevitably limited.
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