Essential Practices for Creating, Strengthening, and Sustaining Process Safety Culture

Book excerpt: An essential guide that offers an understanding of and the practices needed to assess and strengthen process safety culture Essential Practices for Developing, Strengthening and Implementing Process Safety Culture presents a much-needed guide for understanding an organization's working culture and contains information on why a good culture is essential for safe, cost-effective, and high-quality operations. The text defines process safety culture and offers information on a safety culture’s history, organizational impact and benefits, and the role that leadership plays at all levels of an organization. In addition, the book outlines the core principles needed to assess and strengthen process safety culture such as: maintain a sense of vulnerability; combat normalization of deviance; establish an imperative for safety; perform valid, timely, hazard and risk assessments; ensure open and frank communications; learn and advance the culture. This important guide also reviews leadership standards within the organizational structure, warning signs of cultural degradation and remedies, as well as the importance of using diverse methods over time to assess culture. This vital resource: Provides an overview for understanding an organization's working culture Offers guidance on why a good culture is essential for safe, cost-effective, and high quality operations Includes down-to-earth advice for recognizing, assessing, strengthening and sustaining a good process safety culture Contains illustrative examples and cases studies, and references to literature, codes, and standards Written for corporate, business and line managers, engineers, and process safety professionals interested in excellent performance for their organization, Essential Practices for Developing, Strengthening and Implementing Process Safety Culture is the go-to reference for implementing and keeping in place a culture of safety.