July 25th, 2025

Shaping Competence Together: Building a Culture of Competence in High-Hazard Industries

Competency Health and Safety Articles Health and Safety News Health and Safety Training In-House News Industry News Online Health and safety Process Training Reynolds Training Services rts Training Course Trending Uncategorized

What does your site’s attitude to process safety say about you?

In today’s culture of political correctness, you’ll be hard pushed to find an individual ballsy enough to admit to judging a book by its cover. “It’s the substance that counts”, they’ll tell you.

Yet, truth be told, most mere mortals do make snap judgements. Sure, the more diligent are willing to revise opinions upon further investigation.

But don’t be fooled, first impressions do count. We make eleven major decisions about each other in the first seven seconds of meeting, researchers from NYU calculate.

So we must ask whether regulators and customers are prone to this humanistic trait when it comes to your site’s process safety standards. Initially, yes. Upon first exposure, their brains will fire off a thousand computations.

Is your company to be approached or avoided? Are you trustworthy and competent? It is an almost universal truth that your site’s attitude to process safety says much about its overall culture.

Your book cover must therefore represent, at a glance, what your site will deliver to regulators and customers alike. Great book covers imbued with great content equal great sales – it’s simple mathematics really.

Style and substance

Let us not forget about those all important inside pages. This is where substance truly does count. Having got off to a good start, regulators and customers will judge – in finite detail – just how competent your site is.

We must therefore work on a continuous basis to review, revise and refine our process safety systems. The end result is a most compelling read which enthralls from front page to back cover. After all, processing good on-site safety helps:

• Prevent and control risks
• Protect people and premises
• Foster compliance with legislation
• Limit financial losses as a result of avoidable accidents
• Reduce insurance premiums

Good Process Safety Keeps the Regulator Happy

With tightening process safety laws and a renewed focus by the Health and Safety Executive, it is incumbent upon you to keep your site compliant. Doing so will keep you in the Regulator’s good books.

Good Process Safety Keeps Customers Happy

Demonstrating high process safety standards to existing and potential customers can help fuel your site’s own sales. As such, it is important to send out the right signals.

People are more likely to work with those who are process safety proficient as these proficiencies ripple along the supply chain and benefit all stakeholders.

The Fable of Process Safety

Before the chimneys of industry rose from the horizon the great English philosopher, John Locke, postulated that we are born tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which our stories are written.

In 2013, the same most certainly applies to each industrial site. Every organisation has its own tale to tell and, in an age where we are rightly judged by our standards, it has perhaps never been more important that we all write process safety stories which engage our core audiences.

 – The End

Related reading:

• Online process safety training with iLearn
• Watch this video which pits personal safety hazards against process safety hazards
• Process safety guru makes a play for Youtube
• HSE proposes changes to COMAH
• Seveso puts public opinion at the heart of safety policies