Identifying significant safety factors and leading indicators in shipping organizations with oil tanker operations

Safety performance has traditionally been measured by 'after the loss' type of measurements such as accident and injury rates, incidents, dollar costs and OSHA recordable rates. There is a growing consensus among safety professionals and researchers that these are lagging indicators. An accident must occur or a person must get injured before a measure can be made. These measures do not provide necessary insights for avoiding future accidents. It is assumed that the purpose of measuring safety is to develop intervention strategies to avoid future accidents. Recognizing signals before an accident occurs offers the potential for improving safety. These signals termed as leading indicators are defined as conditions, events or measures that precede an undesirable event, and have some value in predicting the arrival of the event, whether it is an accident, incident, near miss, or undesirable safety state.; In this research an attempt was made to identify significant safety factors and leading indicators for shipping operators with oil tanker operations. Investigations into accidents in the past two decades, such as the Chernobyl, the Piper Alpha, the Challenger, and the Bhopal disasters have reported a poor safety culture in the subject organization. Hence the factors that represent the safety culture of shipping operator organizations are explored to identify leading indicators. These safety factors were identified taking into consideration the structure of shipping operator organizations. That is safety factors were proposed for the organizational level, shipboard level and individual level. Surveys were conducted in the industry partner organizations to gather data on the proposed safety factors and safety performance metrics. Analysis of safety factor and safety performance data revealed that the proposed safety factors had a significant association with the safety performance metrics. From the significant safety factors a set of leading indicators was identified for the industry partner organizations. The safety factors and leading indicators were strongly associated with safety performance in both the organizations, revealing the robustness of the factors and indicators.