Understanding Your HSE Culture Tool # 1

About Hearts & Minds Program

• The Hearts and Minds toolkit was developed by Shell E&P, based upon 20 years of university research, and is being successfully applied in both Shell and non-Shell companies around the world.
• Hearts and Minds uses a range of tools and techniques to help the organization involve all staff in managing HSE as an integral part of their business. 
• Collectively, these tools and techniques are known as the Hearts and Minds Toolkit.

This state of the art toolkit is available to those outside the Shell Group, thanks to a publishing agreement between the Energy Institute and Shell E&P. The Hearts and Minds Toolkit has tools suitable for managers, team leaders and workforce at all levels, that are designed to work alongside any existing HSE tools your organisation may already use.

Why this Course?

It is one of the world’s most widely used tool for measuring HSE culture.  The tool measures organisational HSE culture against the Hearts and Minds/Hudson and Parker safety culture ladder.

Culture can be divided into five levels of development, from the ‘Pathological’ to the ‘Generative’, as shown in the picture below:

• Pathological: people don’t really care about HSE and are only driven by regulatory compliance and/or not getting caught.
• Reactive: safety is taken seriously, but only after things have gone wrong. Managers feel frustrated about how the workforce won’t do what they are told.

• Calculative: focus on systems and numbers. Lots of data is collected and analysed, lots of audits are performed and people begin to feel they know “how it works”. The effectiveness of the gathered data is not always proven though.

• Proactive: moving away from managing HSE based on what has happened in the past to preventing what might go wrong in the future. The workforce start to be involved in practice and the Line begins to take over the HSE function, while HSE personnel reduce in numbers and provide advice rather than execution.

• Generative: organisations set very high standards and attempt to exceed them. They use failure to improve, not to blame. Management knows what is really going on, because the workforce tells them. People are trying to be as informed as possible, because it prepares them for the unexpected. This state of “chronic unease” reflects a belief that despite all efforts, errors will occur and that even minor problems can quickly escalate into system-threatening failures.

Ideal for

•  This course is for anyone at work no matter which function they are responsible for

Learning outcome:  

• You are able to identify the local level of HSE cultural maturity and help you formulate your way forward.
• Once you know where you are, you will challenge your aspirations and what you personally and as team will need to do to achieve them.