Employee Survey Identifying Threats and Motivating Factors in the Implementation of ISO 9001 in the Kuwait Oil and Gas Sector

TLDR: In this paper , the authors evaluate the risks and opportunities for the implementation of ISO 9001:2015 in the oil and gas industries using an employee survey as the basis for these evaluations and find that lack of motivation among employees to follow the standards and lack of adequate training contribute the most to the risks.

Abstract: Enterprise standards for business processes such as ISO 9001:2015 are used worldwide in the energy sector. Use of these standards improves business processes and improves organizational quality management. There are however trade-offs to implementation in the form of organizational disruption, startup costs, and institutional resistance to change. Increasing quality management enables improved response to disruptions. Accelerating the implementation of these standards requires employee engagement to identify the benefits to agility and barriers so they can be overcome. Given the scale and regularity of disruptions to the energy sector in past decades, it is urgent that these practices be applied in the industry at a supply chain scale, which will make it an appropriate example to survey employees within the petroleum industry. This example is focused on evaluating the risks and opportunities for the implementation of ISO standards in the oil and gas industries. An employee survey is used as the basis for these evaluations. Based on hypothesis testing, results indicate that lack of motivation among employees to follow the standards and lack of adequate training contribute the most to the risks. Additionally, several opportunities seem to contribute to the reduction of these risks, per the survey takers’ opinions. In a first step, the various factors are compared and studied from the perspective of employees. A survey of employees is prepared from the literature and a pilot study. The results in part illustrate how particular oil and gas companies are pursuing ISO certifications. The survey helps in identifying risks and preparing a roadmap of the processes that can be used by industries and organizations to improve quality practices. This paper should be of wide interest to industries and organizations that are implementing ISO 9001:2015 and other enterprise standards in the energy sector.