Is it true what the CSD report says?

Some senior officers experience that when they present the vessels’ CSD report to their fellow officers and crew, they are met with the claim that the report is not true: ‘This is not our safety culture’.

Crew may have many explanations for the report to be untrue. The ones we often hear are:

• “The survey questions are tricky”
• “My English is not so good, so I didn’t understand the questions”
• “I answered according to my latest vessel”

In some cases, this leads to the conclusion that if crew misunderstand the questions, their answers are not true and consequently the report results do not reflect the true safety culture. But there is another way of understanding the crew’s explanations.

We cannot say that the explanations are not true – and we have an on-going focus on improving the questions. But we also see cases where the crew uses these kinds of explanations to avoid a difficult dialogue and an uncomfortable situation.

For example, we had  vessel that received a report with low scores on leadership. The crew felt uncomforable talking to htier leaders about the poor scores as they feared their leaders’ reactions. Therefore, they used the explanationsn as a comfortable way out of this difficult situation.

If you experience that the crew or senior management do not believe in or acknowledge the report results, don’t give up.

The report can still be used as a starting point for a dialogue about safety. For example, simply talk about the areas where the crew feel the report differs from their understanding of the safety culture and why they think this is the case. This in itself is a valuable dialogue to have as it brings subjects on the table that may otherwise be ignored.

To support you, we have prepared a set of questions that you could ask among the crew during the dialogue:

For each mentioned area, you can ask:

For each mentioned area, you can ask:

Based on what we have talked about: