A safety perception survey at Brahmaputra Cracker and Polymer Limited (BCPL) captured the honest views of 362 employees and nearly 100 contract workers across three Assam facilities. iFluids Engineering ran the safety perception survey over a five-day plant visit, benchmarked the results against world-class safety culture indicators, and handed BCPL a clear roadmap: strong HSE fundamentals already in place, paired with specific, quantified gaps in operational discipline and incident reporting depth. This safety perception survey case study walks through how the assessment was designed, what the safety perception survey found, and what any comparable petrochemical operator can take from it.
Project Snapshot
| Field | Detail |
| Sector | Petrochemical (naphtha cracker and polymer manufacturing) |
| Location | Assam, India |
| Facility Type | Integrated petrochemical complex: Lepetkata, Duliajan, and Lakwa sites |
| Client | Brahmaputra Cracker and Polymer Limited (BCPL) |
| Scope of Work | Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) Safety Perception Survey |
| Standards Applied | IEC 61882 (HAZOP methodology), site HIRA and JSA procedures |
| Project Duration | 5-day site assessment |
| iFluids Team Size | 4 safety consultants |
The Engineering Challenge
BCPL’s leadership needed an honest, statistically grounded read on its safety culture, not another compliance audit built on paperwork review. iFluids Engineering was engaged to design and run a full safety perception survey across BCPL’s three operating sites and translate the raw responses into a prioritised improvement roadmap for site leadership.
A safety perception survey only carries weight if the response base is large enough to reflect the actual workforce, not a self-selected minority. BCPL’s own HSE and IT teams had to stand up an online survey portal capable of capturing anonymous input from hundreds of employees and contract workers across geographically separated units, without any way of tracing an answer back to an individual. That constraint shaped the entire assessment: every question had to stand on its own, and every finding had to be defensible against 51 separate data points rather than a handful of interviews.
The deeper challenge was interpretive. Raw survey percentages do not by themselves tell a plant HOD what to fix first. A response showing that certain percentage of respondents conduct safety rounds only “on a need basis” with no structured schedule looks like a training gap on the surface, but read against the finding that certain percentage of the same respondents interact with workers daily on unsafe acts, it actually points to a scheduling and accountability gap rather than a knowledge gap. Getting that distinction right, consistently, across 51 questions and three sites, is what the client was really paying for.
There was also a scale problem specific to a three-site petrochemical complex. Lepetkata, Duliajan, and Lakwa each run different operating profiles, different shift patterns, and different mixes of company employees and contract workers. A single aggregated percentage across all three risked hiding site-specific weaknesses behind a strong average from one location. The assessment team had to design the survey instrument and the site visit schedule so findings could still be interpreted at a facility level where it mattered, particularly for emergency planning and safety committee awareness, both of which depend heavily on local leadership rather than corporate policy alone.
Recognized for excellence.
PROJECTS DELIVERED ACROSS THE GLOBE
iFluids Approach and Methodology
iFluids Engineering delivered the BCPL safety perception survey through a structured, five-step process that combined a validated 51-question instrument with direct plant engagement, producing a benchmarked assessment rather than a simple response tally.
The safety perception survey methodology followed these steps:
- Survey design and deployment: a 51-question checklist covering HSE policy awareness, incident reporting, risk assessment, training, emergency planning, and management commitment was deployed through BCPL’s IT-enabled online portal, with participation voluntary and anonymous.
- Site engagement: the four-consultant team spent five days across the Lepetkata, Duliajan, and Lakwa sites, interacting with plant HODs and employees at all levels, including contract workers, and cross-checking survey themes against actual records, procedures, and field conditions.
- Response consolidation: The employee responses and contract worker responses were consolidated into percentage breakdowns for every question, avoiding department-level attribution to protect anonymity.
- Benchmarking against world-class indicators: each of seven safety management system dimensions (HSE policy, safe work procedure, task and risk assessment, safety as a line function, emergency planning, incident reporting, and training) was scored on a 1-to-10 scale against global best-practice benchmarks, not against BCPL’s own historical performance.
- Root-cause framing of gaps: rather than listing weak scores in isolation, findings were cross-referenced against related questions to separate genuine knowledge gaps from execution or scheduling gaps, so recommendations addressed the actual mechanism, not just the symptom.
The site’s decision to also run behaviour based safety training at Lepetkata and Lakwa immediately after the safety perception survey meant the assessment had to produce recommendations specific enough to feed directly into that training content, not generic culture commentary. That benchmarking discipline, scoring each dimension against a defined global standard rather than an internal baseline, is what let BCPL see exactly how far a “good” safety management system sits from a world-class one.
Technical Decisions and Engineering Rationale
The non-obvious decision in this engagement was to score BCPL’s safety management system on a 1-to-10 scale even where the underlying survey responses looked strong, because a high response percentage on a single question can mask a structural gap visible only when questions are read together.
Take incident reporting, one of the strongest-scoring areas in the safety perception survey. Majority of the respondents confirmed BCPL has an incident reporting system in place and uses it, and said they always report safety incidents. Taken alone, that reads as a strength. But the survey also showed that the respondents believed safe work procedures get reviewed and updated with a genuine root cause investigation after an incident, and the site’s own First Aid Case (FAC) reporting culture was flagged during plant interviews as inconsistent for minor injuries.
The same cross referencing logic from the safety perception survey applied to Task and Risk Assessment, scored considerably well whrein the respondents confirmed risk assessment is conducted for all job types, and Job Safety Analysis (JSA) is well established as the routine job risk tool. But the site was not consistently applying a Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (HIRA) format for non routine jobs, a distinction most generic safety audits miss because they treat “risk assessment” as a single yes/no line item rather than separating routine job coverage from non routine job coverage.
A third decision worth noting: Safety as a line function scored a considerable level despite a well-established, experienced HSE department, because the safety perception survey and site interviews both pointed to the same root issue, safety was still functioning as a specialist department responsibility rather than a line-management (operations and maintenance) responsibility. Gas testing and safety system inspection, in particular, were flagged as tasks that should sit with line supervisors, not be routed through HSE as a separate check. This same survey also surfaced a related accountability gap: Few number of respondents strongly agreed that supervisors and managers are held directly accountable for injury prevention through their own rating, advancement, and pay, with a further few only in partial agreement, reinforcing that line accountability, not technical HSE capability, was the real constraint.
Outcomes and Deliverables
The safety perception survey delivered a fully quantified safety culture baseline across all 51 questionnaire items, and a prioritised improvement plan that BCPL’s site leadership could act on immediately, backed by response data from employees and contract workers. Unlike a generic audit report, every finding in the safety perception survey traces back to a specific, citable percentage rather than a subjective impression.
| Deliverable | Basis | Outcome |
| Safety Perception Survey Report | 51-question safety perception survey checklist, 3 sites | total respondents; full pie-chart breakdown for every survey question delivered |
| Safety Management System Scorecard | 7 dimensions rated 1-10 | Scores across all dimensions; strongest in HSE policy, incident reporting, and emergency planning |
| Prioritised Improvement Plan | Cross-referenced survey findings | Few specific improvement actions identified, including Operational Discipline rollout and JSA/HIRA differentiation |
| Behaviour-Based Safety Training | Delivered at Lepetkata and Lakwa post-survey | Training content directly built on survey-identified at risk behaviors |
Two figures from the safety perception survey stood out numerically. First, Most of the respondents affirmed that safety overrides production targets as a core value rather than a mere priority, and many others believed long term safety investment helps rather than hinders other business objectives, a strong foundation for BCPL’s stated ambition of a world-class safety management system. Second, most of the respondents described themselves as “deeply involved” in safety improvement activities such as committees or incident investigations, against those who had participated in a safety committee at all in the past two years, showing participation exists but is not yet broad-based across the workforce.
A third figure from the safety perception survey carried particular weight with site leadership: only a small minority of respondents reported conducting site safety inspections or audits daily using a calibrated checklist, while a clear majority said they only walk the plant for safety issues on an as-needed basis with no structured round. Against a workforce where the overwhelming majority rated the safety audit and inspection system as excellent or good, this gap between perceived system quality and actual round frequency became one of the report’s clearest, most actionable findings from the safety perception survey, and it fed directly into the recommendation to publish and circulate a fixed inspection schedule rather than rely on informal plant walks
Lessons and Applicability
This engagement demonstrates a pattern applicable to any multi-site petrochemical or process facility preparing for a Behaviour Based Safety or Process Safety Management rollout: a safety perception survey is only useful if findings are cross-referenced against each other before recommendations are drafted, not read as isolated percentages.
Facilities in Assam, the wider Indian petrochemical belt, and comparable GCC and Southeast Asian sites share a common risk profile with BCPL: strong formal HSE policy and procedure on paper, engaged leadership, and a well-resourced HSE department, but incomplete translation of that foundation into line-function accountability and structured daily safety rounds. The finding from the safety perception survey that a clear majority of respondents conduct safety rounds only on an as-needed basis, with no fixed schedule, despite most reporting daily worker interaction on unsafe acts, is a pattern worth checking for at any site relying on informal safety engagement rather than a published round schedule.
We are a global authority in process safety and risk engineering, and the practical lesson for similar operators is simple: run the safety perception survey, score it against a global benchmark rather than internal history, and let the cross-referenced gaps, not the headline percentages, set the improvement priority list.
Conclusion and Next Steps
The BCPL safety perception survey confirmed a well-established safety management system with visible leadership commitment, and gave site leadership a specific, quantified roadmap toward Behaviour Based Safety and Process Safety Management maturity rather than a generic culture rating. This kind of safety perception survey engagement suits any multi-site petrochemical, refining, or process operator preparing for a BBS rollout, a PSM implementation, or simply wanting an honest, statistically grounded picture of workforce safety perception before the next audit cycle. Anchoring every recommendation to a specific survey percentage, rather than a general impression, is what turned this safety perception survey into a document site leadership could actually act on.
Facilities considering a similar safety perception survey can review iFluids Engineering’s Behaviour Based Safety services or explore our broader Process Safety Management offering. To discuss a safety perception survey or BBS implementation for your own site, contact iFluids Engineering.