Measuring the safety standard of organizations

This paper describes a new general method for measuring the safety standard of an organization. It is assumed that a high safety standard is a result of systematic management and control. The principal idea is therefore to focus on the systematic pattern of safety performance variables in the measurement calculations, which is in sharp contrast to common measuring techniques. The paper focuses on description of the principal idea and some examples for calculations. The most important finding is the methods’ efficiency in measuring the safety culture maturity of seven shipping companies. The method uses a database of nearly 3000 responses on the Ship Management Attitude Questionnaire (SMAQ) held by Risø National Laboratories. The analysis show that the maturity of the safety culture can describe about 50% of the variation in an accident performance indicator and more than 60% of the variation of a Port State Control performance indicator.