Safety Culture: what it is and why it is important
Safety Culture encompasses the ways of acting and ways of thinking shared by Company employees when it comes to managing the highest risks inherent to our activities.
Safety Culture grows and develops within a group of individuals and an entity, depending on its organization, location and criteria that go beyond the realms of safety.
At TotalEnergies, safety is more than just a priority. It's a core value and the basis of our strategy. Our ambition is to be recognized as the benchmark for safety in our industry. To achieve this ambition, we have taken steps to ensure that safety is an integral part of our processes and guides our everyday actions. Safety is a core value that we want everyone to share, from managers and employees to partner companies and local stakeholders.
Developing Safety Culture in order to achieve optimum levels of safety performance requires us to analyze and work on the following factors:
- Technical safety (management of installations, equipment and tools).
- The safety management system (all the organizational rules governing risk management).
- Human and organizational factors (individual and collective factors, analysis of work situations, management styles and sociological aspects of organizations).
- The specific context with respect to the entity's location (aspects related to location, history and regulations).
The Types of Safety Culture in an Organization
- Fatalistic Safety, where employees are barely involved in safety. Personnel think that accidents cannot be avoided and that it is impossible to manage risks.
- Shop-Floor Safety is in the hands of sharp-end workers. They are convinced that experience helps avoid accidents and that risk management is based on the application of the good practices passed on.
- Bureaucratic Safety is in the hands of the managers who are responsible for it. They think that accidents can be avoided by enforcing more rules and that risks are managed by strictly applying prescribed rules.
- Integrated Safety is in the hands of all personnel. They think that accidents can be avoided by applying formal rules and adopting proactive behaviors. Risks are managed when everyone is mobilized.
TotalEnergies Company entities strive to grow an Integrated Safety Culture by analyzing the above factors and embarking on improvement plans based on participative approaches by risk management teams. This type of approach is one of the keys to successfully achieving improvement.