PhD Studentship - Developing remote team safety culture in offshore wind operations.

Overview

Global offshore wind energy is experiencing an unprecedented period of expansion in response to net zero targets and increasing need for renewable energy. Such demands present challenges concerning the maintenance of safety standards. Wind technicians conduct critical operations and maintenance tasks on wind turbines. Their work in remote, hazardous environments with limited supervision and communication necessitates high-level safety performance (Roberts & Flin, 2025). Yet, these characteristics may make it more challenging to maintain the culture necessary to foster positive safety behaviours. Working remotely from their company base, means that frontline supervisors have additional responsibilities for ensuring that the corporate safety culture extends to offshore locations. These supervisors play a key role in setting crew norms, safety behaviours and team culture. However, the mechanisms for maintaining a strong team safety culture for offshore wind crews remain unidentified. 

This doctoral project is designed to identify the key dimensions of a positive team safety culture for remote wind crews, including the individual and organisational level mechanisms that enhance team safety culture, resulting in a toolkit. Whilst existing research frameworks and tools typically examine safety culture at the organisational level (e.g., with safety culture questionnaires), this project will take an approach utilized for other remote workers (e.g., electrical utility workers), examining the mechanisms that can be used to support a positive safety culture at the team level (e.g., cognitive skills, group norms, management practices). As such, the findings may have implications beyond the wind sector for enhancing group safety culture in other remote teams working in the energy sector (e.g., power line technicians).

Supervisors: Dr Ruby Roberts & Prof Rhona Flin, Aberdeen Business School, RGU.