One cannot imagine a petroleum industry where health and safety would not be considered at the forefront of all business activities, where every employee would not consider health and safety assurance a part of their job. This has been achieved by building an industrywide organizational health and safety culture through education, communication, shared values, standards, and systems and through employee and leadership’s engagement in safety. It has, however, taken several decades to get to this maturity level, and there is still room for improvement.
Organizational culture of the past, which focused primarily on profit, has changed with the development of health and safety culture, but it still requires a considerable transformation to respond effectively to social and environmental issues.
With environmental stewardship, the industry cannot afford the time spent gradually shaping the culture because of the imminent requirement for sustainable business practices as part of national and international commitments to climate action and sustainable development, including the industry’s participation in the energy transition.
Corporate sustainability can be enabled or hindered by attributes of organizational culture; therefore, it is important to recognize and consider those attributes for designing effective sustainability programs.
A closer look at the successes and challenges in developing sustainability and environmental culture within the petroleum industry so far leads to the identification of the following three main success factors:
- Strong corporate commitment, visible in practice and genuinely committed leadership
- Translation of corporate sustainability approach into economic value (such as business development advantage, technological innovation agility, energy savings, cost reduction)
- Communication of targets and progress toward them and cascading sustainability objectives down to organizational units
The study identifies several prevailing challenges, including the following:
- Lack of resources
- Lack of leadership or visibility of it
- Skepticism around either the positive role of oil and gas in climate action or the authenticity of corporate sustainability efforts
When comparing survey respondents’ experience of the organizational sustainability culture to its theoretical models, the following can be concluded:
- Sampled organizations’ programs are most developed in the areas suggesting external drivers, such as legislative and customer requirements or public opinion pressure.
- Sustainability vision, corporate values, and their communication are seen as the most culture-enabling elements of the theoretical model in practice
- Challenges in building a sustainability culture are present in all main elements of the theoretical model, likely indicating that the industry is still gaining the experience and developing its approach and solutions for sustainability.
Conclusions and implications can be used by organizations in the early stages of designing sustainability and environmental stewardship programs to consider maximizing the identified success factors while mitigating the challenges to build a sustainability culture that enables organizations to respond to environmental and social demands and build organizational resilience.
SPE members can download the complete paper from SPE’s Health, Safety, Environment, and Sustainability Technical Discipline page for free from 10 to 23 April.