Safety Performance through Operational Discipline

Can a sustainable step change in safety performance be achieved through an enhanced culture of rigorous operational discipline, also known as performance excellence? Background The benefits of a more structured and procedure-based approach to a business are well understood, and thought to improve cost, cycle time, and quality. Anecdotal reports indicate that safety performance improves dramatically on projects or operations where high levels of process discipline are deployed. Yet, it remains to be proven that such a culture of operational discipline positively affects the safety performance of an organization. If it does, how and what key elements (or degrees of operational discipline) are required to produce the improved safety performance? To achieve a genuine breakthrough in the next level of safety performance, the principles that underlie these outcomes must be clearly understood and routinely applied. Notes to team Some things to consider are isolation of operational process discipline as the indicator of safety performance, as opposed to the impact of factors such as cultural, geographic, or organizational structure on safety performance. The intent is to establish correlation and causation of the relationship.