Assessing safety culture among offshore and onshore contractors

What is shaping petroleum, oil & gas

Oil marketing companies, lubricant brands and city gas distributors compete on forecourt experience, product trust and mechanic recommendations.

• Forecourt experience shapes fuel brand loyalty
• Mechanics drive lubricant brand choice
• City gas adoption depends on safety confidence and convenience

An oil and gas operator, working in United Arab Emirates & Saudi Arabia. Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.

Organisation

An oil and gas operator

Sector

Petroleum, oil & gas

Team engaged

Market Research

Services

Quantitative research, Qualitative research, Reporting & insights

The operator worked with many contracting companies and a multinational workforce. Leadership wanted to understand whether safety culture was consistent across contractors, nationalities and sites. Incident investigations had highlighted communication problems between supervisors and crews from different backgrounds.

• Deliver on the brief: assessing safety culture among offshore and onshore contractors.
• Understand the views, needs and behaviour of employees.
• Measure how widespread each pattern is, and explain the reasons behind it.
• Give the client evidence it can act on within 10 weeks.

The work focused on 3,000 employees.

• employees3,000

Audiences we typically reach in petroleum, oil & gas

Fuel customersForecourt staff and dealersMechanics and workshopsFleet ownersCity gas customers

Coverage: United Arab Emirates & Saudi Arabia. Markets: United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

• United Arab Emirates
• Saudi Arabia

A mixed-method design: structured research measured how widespread each pattern was, and qualitative conversations explained why.

1. 1Brief
2. 2Anonymous multilingual survey
3. 3Crew discussions
4. 4Insight

We ran an anonymous survey in Arabic, English, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog and Malayalam, covering safety leadership, stop-work authority, reporting confidence and fatigue, followed by crew discussions without supervisors. Results were reported by contractor and site only where groups were large enough to protect anonymity.

Quantitative researchQualitative researchReporting & insights

employees

3,000

• Business respondents were screened on role, company size and involvement in the decision before being invited.
• Qualitative participants were recruited purposively to cover the full range of experiences that mattered, rather than for statistical representation.

• Interviews and discussions were led by experienced moderators using a guide agreed with the client.

• Recordings and transcripts for every session
• Re-screening of qualitative recruits
• Logic and range checks on the final data
• Work carried out under our ISO 20252 quality procedures

• Cross-tabulation by key groups and locations
• Significance testing on the differences that mattered
• Thematic coding of interviews and discussions
• Journey and decision mapping

• Workers from some contractors were less confident about using stop-work authority.
• A follow-up survey was planned to track progress, and results were shared with contractor management.

Language and contractor differences shaped how safe people felt to speak up.

• Build on the core insight: language and contractor differences shaped how safe people felt to speak up.
• Focus effort where the evidence was strongest: workers from some contractors were less confident about using stop-work authority.
• Re-measure after the changes to confirm the effect.

• The operator introduced contractor-specific safety leadership training and translated safety communications into more languages.

What changed in the business as a result of the work. Impact is described qualitatively.

• Insight report and management presentation
• Cleaned data file and data tables
• Interview summaries and key verbatims

• Repeat the measure after changes are in place to track progress.
• A natural follow-on question: which lubricant brands do mechanics push?