Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without instinctively grabbing for a handrail.
I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space.
I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like:
1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures.
2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it.
3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization.
4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand.
5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that.
What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.
Also, every meeting would start with a safety announcement, all fire exits would be noted etc. I've also worked for BHP in Oz and it was exactly the same - drill this into everyone and the risk of an accident is reduced
And that's why they talked about charger cables and not the oil spewing elephant in the room.
Then you'll remember that they were given an industry award for safety that year. Yes, after the disaster.
Oil and gas is safety obsessed.
And yet…
But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.
One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.