I currently work as HSE practitioner in an oil and gas company. My major concern is that management there only pays lip-service to health and safety issues. At best, management is only reactionary to health and safety issues. How can I improve the safety culture?

Perhaps my 100k+ PA golden egg aspiration is not as easy as I thought.....

Just tell them when it usually goes wrong in your sector its ALWAYS headline news, kills numerous people, involves a very large explosion, a fat cat having to publicly apologise, all manner of creatures being washed ashore covered in treacle (usually on a nice beach) and a huge fine into the £$000000000.

Other than that its the same as everywhere else, the other contributors to this thread will give you good ideas on how to get buy in from senior managers and other behavioural change techniques etc.

(still taken aback the 'flagship' big bucks safety world don't really give a monkies!).

Comes down to the " influencing skills , when faced with such attitudes myself I always do the man to man stuff in private..something along the lines of...Look, what'syernameagain, I'm not so sure that all the staff are taking this as seriously as I'd like, so I'd like if you got on board with this and flexed your muscles. I'll e-mail you a request for this assistance and will CC ( even more senior ) management so they can see that you and I are co-operating in resolving this...Anyway, works for me.

Kenny

Edgar Schein, the pioneer in organisational culture research and development, has always emphasised three factors about cultures in organisation. One is the critical importance of accurate observation; a second concerns the assumptions about culture that dominate an organisation; and the third is that all any individual can actually control is his/her own behaviour. You can read his research and guidance in the latest issue of 'Culture and Leadership', published by Jossey Bass and available through Amazon and university booksellers.

The B-Savvy Safety Stewardship project supports cultural interventions along the lines that Schein has advocated since the first edition was published in 1985. Registration for the project remains free of charge to in-company safety/health professionals up to 7.2.2013. The B-Savvy Safety Stewardship process uses Q methodology invented by one of the most creative organisational psychologists Britain has given the world, the Durham physicist and psychometrician, William Stephenson, who died in 1979. His methods are now promoted through the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity which he co-founded.

If you'd like to receive an introductory guide to the B-Savvy project, simply PM your email address to me.