Safety culture is not a new concept, with origins dating back to 1986, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The recognition of Safety Culture influence on incidents has been growing, with gaps in safety culture having been cited as a major contributory factor to recent failures in the oil and gas industry including Piper Alpha event nearly a quarter of a century ago, and was most recently identified as a causal factor in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Many different approaches have been developed to measure and assess organizational attitudes and behaviours, with the goal of improving safety culture. Traditional approaches for measurement have focussed on:

• questionnaires/surveys

• interviews

• observations

• focus groups

• document analysis

While these approaches have provided, valuable information regarding safety culture, more progressive approaches are being considered by leading companies. The establishment of Safety Culture Indicators and continuous monitoring is becoming more prevalent, leveraging the management systems that companies have in place to help manage their increasingly complex operating environments. Regulators have recognized this too, and are beginning to reference continuous monitoring as an additional approach to be included in a company's toolbox for assessing safety culture.

This paper describes a comprehensive Safety Culture Maturity Model that Applied4Sight Ltd. created to review an organization's management system and existing safety culture assessment approaches to aid in the development of a suite of safety culture indictors. These indicators facilitate organizational implementation of an continuous monitoring approach for ongoing safety culture assessment and continual improvement.