Adapted from: BP's Safety Drive Faces Rough Road

Bob Dudley, the new chief executive of BP, has vowed to change the safety culture of the accident-prone oil giant in the wake of the deadly explosion in the Gulf of Mexico last year. He created a new global safety division at BP, a company that also suffered a 15-fatality refinery explosion in Texas five years before the lethal Gulf accident. The division has power to intervene in or shut down any operation seen as too hazardous. But, the safety issue goes to the heart of BP's corporate culture, say some critics, who contend that compared with its Big Oil rivals, the company has historically been focused more on deal-making and less on safety and operational excellence. "Other companies were less aggressive on growth and more focused on their safety-management systems," says John Hofmeister, a former president of Shell Oil Co. As Mr. Dudley tackles the safety culture, he will be under pressure from U.S. authorities to show improvements. A U.S. presidential commission's report said decision-making processes by BP and its contractors "did not adequately ensure that personnel fully considered the risks created by time- and money-saving decisions."

Phil Dziubinski, a little-known BP safety official on the desolate North Slope of Alaska cautions just how difficult changing the culture will be. Alaska's North Slope, home to BP-operated Prudhoe Bay, is the largest oil field in North America. Workers at the field, which opened in 1977, have long complained of aging infrastructure and a lengthy backlog of needed maintenance work. Mr. Dziubinski became BP's ethics and compliance leader for Alaska operations in mid-2006, shortly after the company suffered a 4,000-barrel oil spill on the North Slope. That happened a year after the refinery explosion in Texas City, TX, an accident that led a federal agency called the Chemical Safety Board to suggest BP managers didn't listen enough to what workers were telling them. "Reporting bad news was not encouraged," the report said, "and often Texas City managers did not effectively investigate incidents or take appropriate corrective action." BP said it was taking steps such as changing its pay structure to better reward safety performance and risk management.

Promising more change, BP in 2006 appointed an ombudsman, retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, to receive and act on concerns raised by workers throughout the company. Subsequently, Mr. Sporkin wrote to BP Alaska saying "we are concerned that the contractor work force has not received adequate assurances of non-retaliation for raising concerns about BP's operations." BP responded "we expect and encourage our employees to raise safety concerns" and "have a zero tolerance policy regarding retaliation." For BP Alaska, the company set up a program to allow employees and contractors to raise issues without fear of retribution, placing Mr. Dziubinski, a veteran safety official, in charge. At first, workers were skeptical. "I thought, 'Here's another supervisor from Anchorage...I'm going to have to be on guard with this guy,'" says Marc Kovac, a steward of United Steelworkers' (USW) Alaska Local 4959. Suspicions faded, and employees soon began turning to Mr. Dziubinski with their grievances. Mark McCarty, a technician who sat on a BP health, safety and environment committee, says, "Phil was a bulldog in terms of making sure our concerns were addressed."

In 2006, BP decided to survey its Alaska workers. It had done this several years earlier and heard concerns about equipment such as fire- and gas-detection systems in need of upgrading, and complaints that cuts in staffing and training had made operations less safe. So BP re-interviewed several hundred workers to see if these issues had been addressed. The review team found progress on some things, like pipeline inspections, but concluded that other matters, such as staffing levels and upgrades to fire- and gas-detection systems, still "need work." BP's plan was to share the detailed survey results with the work force, according to the USW. Instead, BP decided not to for reasons that were undisclosed. At a meeting in March 2007, Mr. Dziubinski disagreed with a supervisor's assessment that the company was on track to fix all safety issues. Mr. Dziubinski said that several problems flagged by workers in the past still hadn't been addressed, and that BP was taking too long to deal with workers' current concerns.

In addition, as thousands of Alaska oil workers retired in recent years, overtime has piled up, and some workers have complained of fatigue. This is an issue Mr. Dziubinski repeatedly raised, once referring to it as an "imminent safety risk." BP technicians on the North Slope work 14 days straight and it isn't uncommon for them to put in shifts lasting 16 or 18 hours, sometimes on successive days. In 2009, Mr. Dziubinski engaged his bosses about staffing levels and the length of work shifts. North Slope workers' normal schedule was two weeks of 12-hour days and seven-day weeks followed by two weeks off. But overtime was common, and some workers told their company safety committees that people were showing signs of fatigue. "You have walking zombies up here," says Mr. McCarty, the BP technician. The USW asked BP in 2008 how much overtime had been logged over three years. It turned out to be double the industry average.

BP added several dozen people to its work force of about 2,000 in Alaska and changed its rules so that for all shifts of longer than 16 hours, approval was needed from what is known as an area manager. Later, BP stiffened this requirement, following a complaint to its ombudsman that some technicians were working consecutive 18-hour shifts. Mr. Dziubinski, who had access to overtime records, informed his bosses about situations that concerned him, including one employee who had worked 36 consecutive days without proper managerial approval and who had logged 320.5 hours of overtime in a single month. He told his superiors that at three "gathering centers"facilities that separate crude into oil, gas and watersome workers "have excessive overtime rates that may require leadership intervention to decrease a safety risk." His emails to his bosses said the rule requiring area-manager approval for shifts of 16 hours or more was followed only about half of the time. Asked about the overtime issue, a BP spokesman said it "is being managed at the highest levels" of the company's Alaska unit. "We have taken measurable steps to reduce the maximum allowable hours," the spokesman said, adding that the company will "not operate facilities unless we are sure we can do so safely."

A facility called the Lisburne Production Center suffered a small spill in autumn 2009, which Mr. Dziubinski came to regard as symptomatic of a larger malaise. A worker there emailed BP two months later with a long list of equipment the worker described as out of service or not working well. Mr. Dziubinski investigated and later told the USW, "The maintenance condition of [that facility] is in a poor state and BP management was not paying attention to it."

Question: It is clear that workers at BP engage in behaviors that indict the company as having a risky, unsafe working environment. The breadth of the safety problems and disastrous consequences observed indicate that the issue is much bigger than a lack of knowledge about how to be safe at work. These employees seem to know how to be safe, but arent applying that knowledge to their workplace. What are the various factors identified in the article that serve as alternative reasons for employees engaging in unsafe behaviors? In other words, if these employees know better, then why do unsafe behaviors persist?