Building a Strong Culture That Produces Sustainable Performance - 13444

Washington River Protection Solutions LLC (WRPS) has been involved with culture improvement for a number of years which has included co-chairing the industry effort to develop the EFCOG safety culture guidance documents [1, 2], and integration of this guidance into organizational processes and behavior expectations, described in more detail below. As various organizational cultural assessments have been periodically performed, and subsequent actions implemented to address improvement opportunities, organizational performance has shown improvement. Culture improvement is evident in the company's industrial safety statistics, event rates, safety culture survey results, employee morale, productivity, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. There does appear to be a relationship between striving to demonstrate behaviors consistent with excellent safety culture and good organizational performance over the past couple of years at WRPS. As performance continues to be evaluated, an improvement opportunity was identified to further enhance performance through field oriented behavioral/cultural improvement activities. WRPS recently conducted a three month effort to improve consistent implementation of management expectations by increasing management field presence with a focus on interacting real-time with workers and first line supervisors, and changing behaviors as appropriate. (authors)