Enlightening Process Safety Culture By Effective Communication Approach

Communication within the organization is essential to business success and achieving good process safety implementation. On an individual level, everyone involved in process safety must be identified and their responsibilities clearly communicated. On a managerial level, leadership is required to create an effective safety culture. It should be noted that management is the driver for employee consultation. The communication can be written, verbal, visible and involve face-to-face discussions to allow individual interactions.

Process safety is one of essential issues that must be communcated to all stakeholders as PHE ONWJ (Pertamina Hulu Energy – Offshore North West Java) deals with hazardous materials which have the potential to cause major incidents that may result in fatalities, environmental damage, degraded business reputations and financial losses. There are several alternative media choices that enable organisations to communicate with their internal and external stakeholders.This paper explains the various communication channels that are available and have been implemented in PHE ONWJ. This includes conservative booklets and banners, online posters, e-books and an interactive learning system which contains specific information related to process safety.

PHE ONWJ has been using a variety of communication medias; this is important to keep the interest of the receivers and match the importance and complexity of the message. Communication medias have different characteristics in terms of "bandwidth," resources required, time and space. So, the most important decision is how to choose the most effective media communication to a specific targeted audience such as the leadership or workers, so that they understand what we want to deliver. If the communication is well received, then the process safety program will be easily delivered throughout the company.

The process safety survey is conducted as a tool by PHE ONWJ to measure the effectiveness of the process safety communication and its programs. We believe that we can improve the knowledge and culture in process safety by implementing the correct communication tools.