CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 77, 2019 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.cetjournal.it Guest Editors: Genserik Reniers, Bruno Fabiano Copyright © 2019, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. I SBN 978-88-95608-74-7; I SSN 2283-9216 Human Factors and Safety Management: a Field Study on Safety Performance in the Process Industry Bruno Fabiano a, *, Margherita Pettinato a , Andrea P. Reverberi b , Fabio Currò a a DICCA - Civil, Chemical and Environmental Engineering Dept. – Genoa University, via Opera Pia, 15 – 16145 Genoa, Italy b DCCI - Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry Dept. - Genoa University, via Dodecaneso 31 - 16145 Genoa, Italy bruno.fabiano@unige.it As widely reported in the scientific literature, audits, benchmarking, safety performance indicators and accident data help the management to understand the current safety performance status and to individuate strong and weak areas of the safety management system. Additionally, being process safety incidents relatively rare, as evidenced in the Baker report on BP Texas City accident, safety performance cannot be measured effectively alone on the basis of such high profile incidents. In the first phase of the research program, process and occupational injuries were studied, collecting field data in a large process industry, over five-year observation. Technical and management improvements seem no longer sufficient to promote safety as at-risk behaviour and unsafe attitudes are still present in spite of all training, supervision and guidance. A thorough analysis on underlying causes connected with human failure was subsequently performed by designing a structured questionnaire, for both in-house and outsourced frontline workers. Data statistical analysis allowed quantifying four conceptual key dimensions within the firm, namely: individual behaviour, organizational climate, human resource management and plants/technology. Significant results were utilized to evidence individual and corporate elements affecting accident frequency for the two workforce types. Conclusions were focused on identifying technical and managerial options to reduce the likelihood of errors and increase risk resilience. 1. Introduction Human factors always play a vital role in occurrence of accidents at the work place. Learning from previous failures is one of the pillars of modern approach to risk management: the ultimate goal of the industrial accident analysis is the generation of lessons learned in order to avoid accident recurrence (Sikorova et al., 2017). Human factor can be defined as the study of all the elements that make easier to do the work in the right way, depending upon the relationship between humans, the tools and equipment used in the workplace and the work environment. Historically, the debate about the involvement of human factor in accident occurrence did not gain immense priority in the psychological domain, until the happening of some major industrial tragedies due to human blunder: collision of two jumbo jets at runway in Tenerife (1977), Three Miles Island incident in 1979 (Chen et al. 2013), and Seveso accident (Fabiano et al., 2017). Additionally, investigations in the maritime history, dealing with collision of two vessels, revealed that the role of human factor was pivotal for the coordination dilemma between vessels or members of same crew (Chauvin et al. 2013) or for erroneous decisions made during emergency, causing accident escalation (Vairo et al., 2017). In the last few years, new pressures and related safety threats have been developing rapidly, e.g., cost cutting and downsizing, plant complexity and ageing, early retirement, outsourcing, job-hopping, and complacency; high profile process accidents still happen and emphasize the importance of process safety performance metrics to enable and maintain good safety management (De Rademaeker et al., 2014). It should be noted that human error is not necessarily due to incompetence, lack of motivation or lack of attention, but is determined by multiple occurrences for a particular situation and environment. It is however generally assumed that operators implement unintentional errors, although they might be well trained and safety- educated, including real errors, violations, deviations and lapses. In Italy, a clear decreasing trend in occupational fatalities and injuries was observed in last three decades, but still there are redundant avoidable DOI: 10.3303/CET1977048 Paper Received: 10 December 2018; Revised: 2 May 2019; Accepted: 22 June 2019 Please cite this article as: Fabiano B., Pettinato M., Reverberi A., Curro F., 2019, Human Factors and Safety Management: a Field Study on Safety Performance in the Process Industry, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 77, 283-288 DOI:10.3303/CET1977048 283