Comparing Paper and Digital Procedure Formats: Different Attitudes,Quality Perceptions and Deviations

Abstract

Operating procedures are an integral part of the high-risk industries such as the Oil & Gas industry. Workers need them as a tool to help complete tasks effectively, efficiently, and safely and in the intended manner (Amyotte et al, 2007). Often, the assumption in the process safety domain is that procedures are very high quality, if not perfect, and therefore workers must follow them rigidly. What is all too often the case is that workers encounter a number of issues with procedure quality (e.g., inaccurate information, outdated steps; Hendricks & Peres, under review; Sasangohar et al., 2018). These quality issues have been shown to be associated with more deviations (Hendricks & Peres, under review). Now that many in the industry are starting to move toward digital procedures (hand-held, interactive, not .pdfs), there needs to be an examination of not only these issues, but also attitudes regarding procedure compliance and utility since these are related to deviations and also procedure use (Hendricks & Peres, under review).

Accordingly, this study sought to answer the question—are workers’ perceptions of quality, attitudes, and deviation behavior different based on procedure format (digital vs. paper)? Our study consisted of 32 chemical processing and logistics workers at a large, multi-national corporation. Half of the participants (n = 16) were already using digital procedures and the other half had not experienced a digital procedure roll-out. We were able to make both within and between- subject comparisons with the data since those digital users also still used paper for other tasks. For the within-subjects level of analysis (LOA), workers had significantly poorer quality perceptions of paper format procedures than digital procedures. Although not significantly different, workers reported more deviations for paper procedures. For the between- subjects LOA, procedure quality perceptions were significantly worse for paper procedures (paper only group) when compared to digital procedures in the digital rollout group. Deviations, utility attitude, and compliance attitude were not significantly different for the two formats (better attitudes regarding utility, poorer attitudes regarding compliance, fewer deviations for digital) and the effect sizes were at or above medium. We think it is important to start this line of research in the process safety industries because if the transition to digital procedures is already occurring, we need evidence that it is justifiable by demonstrating—especially at different LOAs—that we can expect improvements in these critical procedure-related variables. We need to expand this line of research to other companies, and to multiple sites with larger samples. Indeed, one of the challenges is gaining access to such important workers, but we see a large benefit to organizations who ultimately will be investing many resources into these types of changes.