Becoming a High Reliability Organization
DEKRA’s latest white paper, “Becoming a High Reliability Organization: Assessing Organizational Process Safety,” explores why catastrophic incidents continue to happen and what organizations can do to prevent them.
When catastrophes happen, it is easy to assign blame and think “that can't happen here.” However, hundreds of decisions are made every day in industries that have the potential to harm workers and damage facilities. Catastrophic incidents continue to occur despite the best of intentions. How can we know we are doing enough to prevent these incidents from impacting our workers, our facilities, and ultimately our communities?
Organizational Culture and Capability represents two critical components inherent to managing catastrophic risk effectively. First, culture is what people do in response to deeply held values of the organization. Capability represents the combined skills, experience and expertise that people have in the organization.
In addition to ensuring that Organizational Culture and Capability are a part of a robust Process Safety program, an increasing number of organizations are implementing Process Safety principles beyond the scope of traditional regulation. Industries like pulp and paper, food and beverage, hazardous materials transportation and mining recognize that rare but catastrophic events can occur within their facilities. They also understand that these hazards are not managed well using traditional occupational health and industrial hygiene principles.
Some organizations are very successful in avoiding catastrophic events, even in environments with high risk factors and complex operations. Known as Highly Reliable Organizations (HROs), these operations have developed cultures that embrace the understanding of hazards and risk, drive proper management of risk and value learning from experience.
This white paper explores how organizations can assess their organizational maturity to become a high reliable organization. You will learn:
- How a facility can recognize how well they are implementing their Process Safety program to move their organization towards becoming a HRO.
- How effective Process Safety programs ensure the elements adapt with changes within the organization’s technology, design, workforce composition, and business procedures.
- The concepts behind Organizational Culture and Capacity.
- How Process Safety works beyond the chemical industries.
- Practices that can help an organization move to the next level of organizational Process Safety maturity.
- A breakdown of the DEKRA Organizational Process Safety solution.