Global Safety & Health Peer Benchmarking: A Case Study

Some academic literature suggest that safety culture surveys have limited predictive value. [...]they must be supplemented with material that accounts for real practice. The authors' reporting process included reporting on the study methodology, outlining the study's limitations and constraints, providing survey results for each peer organization/BHP Billiton business unit, and providing comparative analysis of each organization's elements and attributes results against the global best practice literature. The authors discovered a high degree of consistency across organizations in the uptake of the tools and strategies represented in the multiple-choice responses across the elements and attributes (e.g., all organizations have leadership, catastrophic risk management and auditing programs, and documented safety and health management systems in place). [...]benchmarking studies should consider how to factor for study limitations and constraints (i.e., a methodology for factoring into the scoring that the organization commissioning the study will display an inherent bias toward being more self-critical in response than peers invited to participate who tend to be overly generous when reporting the systems that are in place).