Empirical validation of operating discipline as a leading indicator of safety outputs and plant performance

Abstract Historically, companies have tended to rely on injury/incident frequency measures to gauge their safety performance. There are several standardised ways to calculate lost time or total recordable injury rates. However, there are limitations to using incident frequency as a measure of safety performance, for example due to incomplete incident records and classification errors, or frequency of accidents being statistically unreliable. This paper introduces Operating Discipline (OD) and trust towards management as potential leading indicators and explores the relationship between OD and a range of safety outputs including personal safety, process safety and plant reliability. The study was conducted in one of the world's leading integrated oil and gas companies in the “Upstream operations” part of the business which is responsible for oil and gas production and processing. The OD data was collected through a survey administered to the workforce throughout September to November 2015 and safety/reliability data was taken from the company’s internal databases. The results demonstrate that OD predicted process safety performance and plant availability but not personal safety. Trust towards management predicted both personal and process safety performance.