CER Safety Culture Technical Workshop (2023) Summary Report

August 3, 2023

Introduction

The Canada Energy Regulator (CER) hosted a virtual Safety Culture Technical Workshop on 7 June 2023 for regulated company directors, managers and practitioners responsible for delivery of safety culture initiatives. The workshop brought together 32 participants from the CER and industry (28 representatives from 17 different regulated companies) to have an open dialogue on safety culture advancement efforts, challenges, and best practices. The workshop facilitated meaningful conversation among the participants and encouraged sharing of experiences and learning from one another in a small group environment.

The workshop objectives were to:

• Promote learning and sharing across CER regulated companies;
• Promote learning and sharing between the CER and regulated companies; and
• Listen and learn from the actions of others to improve the regulator’s performance.

CER Three-Year Safety Culture Strategy

The CER shared information regarding its accomplishments from the implementation of its three-year safety culture strategy for 2020–23 and highlighted current development of the 2023–26 strategy. Both strategies are based upon two goals: (1) a focus on system influence or advancing safety culture across industry and (2) a focus on individual company understanding of human and organizational factors (HOF) including safety culture. These goals aim to be achieved through:

• Development and sharing of safety culture guidance and tools;
• Development of analytics to help identify human and organizational factors with company outreach activities to discuss findings;
• and Regulatory collaboration with other agency members of the North American Regulators Working Group on Safety Culture.

To date, the CER has accomplished the following efforts:

• Release of an updated Statement on Safety Culture;
• Development and public release of a Safety Culture Learning Portal, which is updated regularly and provides access to materials related to safety culture;
• Annual release of the CER’s Departmental Results Framework survey results via a letter to all Accountable Officers and public report;
• Sponsorship and leadership of CSA Express Document 16:22 entitled Human and Organizational Factors for Optimal Pipeline Performance;
• Execution of data projects to test for HOF intelligence within existing CER datasets to inform future industry conversations; and
• Data collection to evaluate CER’s effectiveness and the value added by efforts taken to support continual improvement.

Workshop Format

The workshop opened with remarks from the CER’s Chief Safety Officer (CSO). Four presentations with opportunity for group discussions followed. Topics included:

• CER safety culture efforts
• A Group 1 company’s safety culture advancement efforts
• A Group 2 company’s safety culture advancement efforts
• An introduction to Human and Organizational Factors and Case Study

The workshop concluded with closing remarks from the CER’s CSO that touched on many of the themes highlighted in the discussion.

What We Heard

Across Workshop Discussions

The following themes were noted during the workshop discussions:

• Leadership. Recognition was made that safety culture advancement includes providing leadership support to execute the actions, decisions, and behaviours that best signal a commitment to harm prevention and foster psychological safety. Example topics included support on how to respond to bad news, language use, how to promote open and upward flow of safety-related information, and the importance of openly recognizing poor performance results while being wary of positive results.
• Language. The importance of the language used - whether by leadership or as part of safety improvement initiatives – was described as a critical factor to consider when engaging in safety culture improvement efforts. Discussions highlighted that language/terms used can sometimes be misperceived, compromising well-intentioned efforts.
• Just Culture. Comments recognized that individual blame is counterproductive to an organization’s continual improvement and that while accountability must be maintained, it should be balanced with efforts that support individual and organizational learning and improvement. The use of lifesaving rules was briefly discussed including how violations resulting in immediate dismissal may impede an organization’s ability to effectively learn about what happened within the workplace system and address the deficiencies that ultimately contributed to that violation.
• Merging Cultures. Discussions also referenced the unique challenges companies face when going through mergers and acquisitions in having to amalgamate various cultures into one.

Feedback for CER Efforts

With respect to CER’s safety culture advancement efforts, participants noted that the following would be helpful:

• Leadership Toolkits and Resources. Designed to best support the unique and meaningful engagement of different levels of leadership with frontline workers (e.g., Board of Directors, senior executives, middle management, front-line supervisors).
• Scalability of Safety Culture Assessment and Advancement Practices. Particularly information on how small organizations can best assess and advance safety culture as the tools and approaches developed for large organizations aren’t always a good fit.
• Methodologies that support Human & Organizational Factor data collection. Methods and techniques that support making inferences on Human and Organizational factors from existing or new data.
• Communities of Practice. Offering avenues for industry members to come together regularly and share best practices with the regulator in the room sometimes to share the information, research, tools & resources but also allowing companies to have conversations on their own.
• More Timely Sharing of Regulatory Intelligence. This includes improved sharing of information on occurrence contributing factors, such as those related to human and organizational factors, and sharing of patterns and trends from cross-company analysis.

A preference for smaller bite-size communication tools with additional information available for those who desire more details was relayed. It was also noted that the value from these tools is the discussion they generate across the workforce (i.e., helping people find the answer and what it means to them in their organizational context).

Workshop Evaluation

Feedback from the workshop was collected via a short poll at the end of the session.

A majority of participants indicated the workshop to be of “good” (50%) or “very good” (46%) value in terms of knowledge and insights, “average” was selected by the remainder of participants (4%).

The Human and Organizational Factors introduction and corresponding case study portion was rated most favorable in terms of knowledge and insights gained (54%), followed by Company presentations about safety culture advancement efforts (35%) and the presentation and discussion of CER safety culture advancement efforts (12%).

Eighty-one percent of respondents selected “very likely” to discuss information heard in the workshop with staff or leaders in their company, followed by 15% endorsing “somewhat likely” and 4% selecting “somewhat unlikely”.

Last, participants were asked to select their top areas of interest for (1) future guidance or discussion related to safety culture advancement and (2) CER led activities to support safety culture. Top responses included (1) Human and Organizational Factors/performance, safety culture assessment tools, and the role of the management system and leadership in supporting a healthy safety culture. When asked about specific activities that the CER could consider including as part of the 2023–26 safety culture strategy, the top responses were continued annual safety culture workshops, creation of a community of practice, and leveraging mechanisms for improved sharing of best practices within and across industries.

Next Steps

The CER will use the intelligence from the workshops to inform the implementation of our three-year safety culture strategy (2023–26), including a detailed workplan, prioritization, and timelines. On completion, the strategy and workplan will be published on the CER’s Safety Culture webpage located on the CER website. The CER will also continue to seek opportunities for ongoing outreach with industry members on safety culture advancement.

Date modified:

2023-08-01