Resources Allocated to Promote Safety Culture Advancement: 2020–21 CER Survey Results

As part of the CER’s Safety and Environment Oversight core responsibility, the CER requires companies to continually evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their management system in accordance with the Onshore Pipeline Regulations. The CER also encourages companies to promote a positive safety culture in order to effectively manage threats to people and the environment.

As part of the CER’s commitment to performance measurement and continual improvement, we asked industry members to provide information on resources allocated to promoting safety culture advancement. The CER has collected this information via an online survey over the past three years – the most recent survey period ended in March 2021.

The information collected in the surveys is not intended to evaluate the performance of regulated entities. The information is used to evaluate the CER’s Safety and Environment Oversight performance (Management System and Industry Performance metric N21 in particular), as per the CER’s Departmental Results Framework (DRF).

The data collected for 2020–21 (including the three-year trends for survey participation and allocation of resources) are as follows:

Safety Culture Survey Response Rate

Allocation of Resources to Promote Safety Culture Advancement Results

Results for 2020–21

Sixty-nine companies were asked to describe resources allocated to Safety Culture (SC) in 2020–21 (compared to 66 in 2019/20). This year, the response rate was 87%. All respondents indicated “yes” to allocating resources to safety culture; however, upon review and based upon details provided by companies, safety culture advancement efforts could only be verified in 72% of responses.

In 2020–21, the most frequent type of advancement effort was “Program Development and Implementation” (selected by 37 respondents) followed by “Safety Culture Training” (27 respondents), "Safety Culture Assessment" (19 respondents), and “Safety Culture Expert Consultation” (12 respondents).;

Companies were asked to “rate the extent to which the CER contributed to your organization's advancement of safety culture". Respondents noted: 34% Not at all, 38% Slightly, 21% Moderately, 7% Very. The CER’s Statement on Safety Culture and outreach efforts were identified as positively impacting company advancement efforts.

In responding to what the CER could do in future to support companies’ safety culture efforts, several respondents (13%) noted that forums and workshops to share learnings and best practices would be valuable. Approximately half of respondents (47%) noted that guidance material on best practices related to safety culture and operations, incidents (i.e., case studies), cultural assessments, and human and organizational factors would be useful.

These findings support the CER’s current 3-year safety culture plan, which includes outreach activities, release of our online learning portal, and production of safety culture guidance materials.

Date modified:

2023-07-27