BP CEO says employee bonuses will be tied to company’s safety record

When Bob Dudley took over from Tony Hayward as BP's CEO, some saw the move to replace the bumbling Brit with the Mississippi native chiefly as a canny PR ploy. On Tuesday, Dudley made a move that might change the minds of some of those folks: He sent out an email to BP employees informing them that upcoming bonus payments will be distributed based solely on employees' performance on safety issues.

Cynics will still probably dismiss the move as a transparent attempt by the tarnished oil giant to improve its image. But Dudley said in the email that he's out to reconfigure BP's corporate culture, so as to place the question of safety performance front and center in the company's new roster of priorities.

"We are taking this step in order to be absolutely clear that safety, compliance and operational risk management is BP's number one priority, well ahead of all other priorities," Dudley wrote. "In particular, we are committed to ensure that a low-probability, high-impact incident such as the Deepwater Horizon tragedy never happens again."

At the same time, though, the announcement stipulated that the new bonus standards only applied to the fourth quarter of this year's business. That could mean that Dudley is adopting a gradual approach to the new safety-first management regime at BP--or else, as the cynics would have it, that he wants to be noticed as a tough-minded safety enforcer mainly while the company's safety record continues to draw critical media scrutiny.