Understanding Challenges Managers Face in Enforcing Procedures to Reduce High Incident of Accidents Occurring in the Oil and Gas Industry

Summary The oil and gas industry spends billions of dollars yearly on health, safety, and environmental sustainability (HSES) programs to avoid accidents but have no success in achieving zero accidents (Yang, 2019). The purpose of the qualitative exploratory study is to examine and understand the challenges line managers face when implementing and enforcing policies and procedures to reduce high accident incidents in the oil and gas industry. The researcher selected five production line managers or supervisors and five production employees as participants in the oil and gas industry located in the United Arab Emirates. Each participant participated in one semi-structured interview via Zoom. Data analysis included the transcription of audio recordings via Zoom and interview notes into transcripts, and the researcher conducted inductive six-phase thematic coding analysis. Study findings indicated oil and gas industry managers face employee, management, and organization-driven challenges. Findings also highlighted the importance of applying leadership tactics to eliminate workplace accidents and managing logical, psychological, or sociological resistance to change. Integrating social, economic, and environmental sustainability dimensions will result in the efficiency of HSES policy change, overall performance increase, and sustained accident reduction efforts. Any organization can adopt the implications for practice as it applies to the environment, social (health), and economy. Recommendations for further studies include the use of a whole-system approach to solve complex organizational issues (Stansfield et al., 2020).