Gunnar Breivik - Vice President HSE, Hydro Oil and Energy –Operations, Norway

Christmas evening in 2000 a fatal accident occurred on one of Norsk Hydro’s platforms in the North Sea. Surprisingly massive criticism from NPD and society lead to radical self examination and self knowledge within the organisation (Oil and Gas Operation). The main learning from this was that the company over time had worked itself into an unbalance between structure and culture, with too much emphasis on regulations and too little emphasis on individual and group behaviour. This again lead to an extensive action plan for improved safety and HSE culture within O&G Operation. Because culture very much is a matter of proficiency, we established a training field for all employees where the main training element was to find out what we do when we are good and that way build up a best practice from inside the organization. By using the core values as an anchoring point for making decisions in a dilemma and emphasis on “it depends on me”, we built behaviour culture throughout the organization and made people more accountable for each other’s safety. By the end of the program each group established binding promises as training elements in the daily work. The program also committed top managers to participate the first day of all workshops as a part of the dialogue with the organization. The program caused a massive positive reaction from the organization and indicators showed that after some time this kind of training contributed to recreating a balance between structure and culture as well as improving HSE performance by strengthening culture in the organization. The biyearly “Working environment survey” shows significant improvement in culture elements from 2001 to 2003 and the NPD,s investigation of perceived risk level shows positive development amongst Hydro personnel in the same period. The program made visible a need for leadership training in order to secure and enhance the daily training in culture based behaviour. Based on the experience from the proficiency training and interviews with a large number of leaders, we made a program called “Management, Leadership and Culture building” in order to focus on the fact that leaders are the most important culture builders in the organisation. Similar to the proficiency training, this training camp is also to be followed up by day-to-day training in the work situation by the individual leader. Based upon the experience of how effective this type of training has been in order to strengthen good leadership, culture building and personal responsibility, and how these factors finally influence the company’s value creation and HSE performance, we now plan for follow-up programs for all employees to strengthen the competence within these topics even furt