HR lessons from a report into the Titan submersible disaster

Earlier this month, the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation released a report into the Titan submersible disaster. Here, a partner at a global law firm unpacks the takeaways for HR teams.

In mid-2023, the Titan, an ocean submersible produced and operated by OceanGate and carrying five passengers, was engaged in a deep-sea expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic, located nearly four kilometres deep at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. As was widely reported at the time, the submersible imploded at a depth of approximately three kilometres deep, due to a catastrophic failure of its pressure hull, killing all five passengers instantaneously.

On 5 August of this year, the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation released a 335-page report into the disaster, which found that, as per its executive summary, that the implosion was a “preventable tragedy” and “… that OceanGate’s failure to follow established engineering protocols for safety, testing, and maintenance of their submersible was the primary causal factor. The investigation further identified the need for proper corporate governance, a professional workplace culture, and improved regulatory oversight … for novel vessel designs and operations.”

The report’s findings

The US Coast Guard’s report further noted that one of the primary causes of the disaster was “OceanGate’s toxic workplace environment, which used firings of senior staff members and the looming threat of being fired to dissuade employees and contractors from expressing safety concerns”.

Certain “toxic” elements of OceanGate’s workplace culture were also explored, including repeated failures to take safety concerns seriously, autocratic management, and employee firings.

According to the report, OceanGate chief executive Stockton Rush “cultivated an environment where safety concerns of the mission director were often dismissed, diminished, or overruled, leading to numerous hazardous situations during OceanGate’s dive excursions”.

“Decisions were made unilaterally at the top, with Mr Rush often bypassing established protocols and ignoring the concerns of other experienced OceanGate employees and contractors,” the report said.

Moreover, the report detailed, “OceanGate’s management actively retaliated against employees who raised legitimate compliance-related concerns.”

Psychological safety

In conversation with HR Leader, Dentons employment law partner Paul O’Halloran said there is much employers can learn about reducing the risks toxic workplaces can have based on the findings of the Titan report.

Employers, he said, can identify unsafe workplace practices that contribute to toxic workplaces by looking for certain warning signs, like a fear of speaking up, whereby “employees avoided raising concerns, asking questions or challenging ideas due to a fear of retaliation or negative consequences”, high turnover, in which “employees [are] frequently resigned or were fired and then replaced by contractors”, or if there is a sense of avoidance, from which no practical conversations about how to address workplace issues are facilitated.

To ensure compliance with psychological safety guidelines across the country – especially for Victorians, whose new guidelines commence at the end of this year – O’Halloran suggested that employers seek feedback from employees in meetings with teammates, deliver on what they say they will do, and promote role clarity.

“Teams who have managers with high behavioural integrity trust their managers more and go above and beyond. This builds psychological safety,” he said.

Employers should also, he went on, undertake “regular workplace surveys and spot checks to identify the mood, workloads, and work patterns of the workplace. Where are themes starting to emerge? Are some teams working too hard? Where are all the resignations emerging from?”

“Conduct workplace investigations into poor workplace culture and think carefully about causes, common themes, and potential perpetrators. An investigation alone is not enough,” O’Halloran said.

Finally, he said employers should formulate disciplinary responses “and swiftly remove perpetrators or toxic individuals from the workplace”.