Building a Culture of Safety: Compliance Management Best Practices for Gas Operators

For gas operators, building a culture that takes safety seriously is one of the greatest challenges they face, especially as regulatory requirements evolve. Without a strong culture of safety, compliance becomes something people do because they have to, and not because they understand why it matters. Steps get skipped, near-misses go unreported and risks go unnoticed until something fails.

Gas operators don’t have to figure out how to build a culture of safety on their own. The American Petroleum Institute (API) created Recommended Practice (RP) 1173, a pipeline safety management system (PSMS) framework, to help gas operators manage risks, continually improve safety performance and cultivate a safety culture organization-wide. While RP 1173 is voluntary, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) recommends adopting it as the basis for a PSMS.

The following best practices draw from the 10 key elements of RP 1173 to help safety practitioners strengthen compliance programs and build a culture that reinforces them.

1. Demonstrate Leadership Commitment

At a gas utility, a safety culture starts at the top. Leaders who consistently fund training, participate in safety performance reviews and respond to audit findings or incident reports with corrective action set an example for the entire workforce. They show that safety isn’t just a checklist, but something that’s embedded in how the organization operates.

For example, when an executive reviews near-miss trends and directs resources toward addressing them, it demonstrates that near-miss reports will be acted on — not filed away. This kind of engagement shapes how everyone in a leadership role views safety, empowering supervisors to enforce safety procedures because they know senior leaders will back them up. Meanwhile, field crews recognize that compliance is an operational priority. As a result, compliance moves from something people do on paper to something that truly prevents incidents.

2. Align Training With the Work

Effective utility compliance training is role-specific and scenario-based to prepare employees for the situations they’ll actually encounter, so they can make sound safety decisions in the field. For example, a crew installing a new service line may be fully trained on the technical work but never shown how to recognize and report a potential cross-bore. This is the kind of blind spot that role-specific training is designed to catch.

Training materials should be living documents that are reviewed and updated regularly to reflect current procedures and regulatory requirements. Workers should also be encouraged to point out when training doesn’t match what they’re actually experiencing day-to-day, whether by completing a feedback form or speaking up during job briefings.

3. Turn Reporting and Audits Into Action

When crews treat every close call as useful data rather than worrying about blame, patterns emerge that reveal risks before they become failures. For instance, if three separate crews report the same fitting failing during installation over six months, that trend could point to a problem with installation training or a need to switch to a different fitting specification.

Similarly, when internal compliance audits are used diagnostically rather than as a formality, they’re one of the most effective regulatory compliance best practices that a gas operator can adopt. They give operators a chance to identify and correct compliance issues before a PHMSA inspector finds them.

4. Build Regulatory Relationships Early

Regulatory interactions don’t have to be reactive. Operators who proactively share safety data, ask questions about emerging requirements and show a commitment to improvement form a collaborative relationship with regulators rather than an adversarial one. A strong track record of engagement also contributes to smoother inspections and audits — not because regulators look the other way, but because there are fewer issues to find.

Partner With Altamira to Strengthen Your PSMS

Knowing what a strong pipeline safety management system looks like is the first step to building one. Implementing a PSMS that works across your organization is where it gets more challenging.

Altamira helps gas operators put RP 1173 into practice by developing site-specific processes that manage risk and support ongoing compliance. Contact our team to discuss your compliance needs.