What does your crew actually think about safety on board?
Not what they write in a near-miss report, and not what the master says at the management review. Soundings asks all 94 questions of an established organizational climate instrument, anonymously, in the language each seafarer speaks, and turns the answers into a picture of where your safety culture is thin.
Crew, here to answer a survey?
Open the link or scan the QR code your company gave you. Nothing to log in to, and nobody can see who wrote what.
Why we built this
Soundings began as a thesis: a year spent measuring organizational climate across an offshore fleet. 269 seafarers, every rank from cadet to master and twenty-one nationalities. The results were not what management expected. Supervisory support scored high. Crews rated efficiency lowest of the eighteen dimensions, and ratings reported noticeably less autonomy than the officers above them.
None of that was visible in the incident statistics. It came out only because 269 people answered honestly, and they answered honestly because the survey could not identify them.
Then we tried to repeat it. Distributing forms, chasing vessels for responses, and rebuilding the analysis by hand in Excel took weeks, which is exactly why most owners run this kind of survey once and never again. Soundings is that whole process, minus the weeks.
What it looks like on board
A QR poster in the messroom, or a link in the vessel bulletin. A seafarer scans it, picks their language, and answers 94 statements on a four-point scale in about 45 minutes. No app, no account, no email address. It works with no connection at all, so an AB can answer in the middle of the North Sea and the phone sends it when the ship is back in coverage. English, Tagalog, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Polish, Norwegian and Brazilian Portuguese so far.
The anonymity is structural. There is no name, no email, no crew number and no IP address anywhere in the database, and any group smaller than five is withheld from every report, so the one bosun who answered can never be singled out. Rank and nationality are optional, because in our own study some crew said even those felt too close for comfort.
What you get back
A report you can hand to a superintendent, a vetting inspector or the board. Eighteen dimensions scored and ranked worst to best, so the argument starts at the bottom of the list. Differences between ranks and nationalities tested properly, with the small-sample noise filtered out rather than presented as findings. Your fleet against everyone else on the platform, and against your own fleet last year once you have run it twice.
The questions come from the Organizational Climate Measure published by Patterson and colleagues in 2005, which is why the numbers mean something outside your own company. We added twelve safety items for ships: whether procedures survive time pressure, whether people feel ready for a fire or an order to abandon ship, whether raising a concern leads to anything, and whether a mistake can be reported without fear of blame.
What it will not do
It measures what people believe, which is not the same as what they do. It will not tell you who said what, by design, so you cannot use it to manage an individual. And a few of the eighteen scales hold together less well when a crew answers in their second language, which we would rather say here than bury in an appendix. The safety climate items, the ones you probably care most about, are among the strongest.
Your first survey is free, and it covers the whole fleet
Not a one-ship taster. A single crew is too small a sample to mean much: twenty answers cannot carry group comparisons, and the anonymity floor hides most of them. So the free survey is every ship you run. We set it up, you put the posters in the messrooms, and you get the full results at no cost: every dimension, every breakdown, the complete report.
The deal, stated plainly: your anonymized fleet aggregates join the industry benchmark that the comparison is built on. No scores below five respondents, no company named, ever. That is what the free survey costs, and it is written into the terms. From your second survey on, when the year-over-year trend starts answering whether your interventions worked, you pay.