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By Ashleigh "AL" Oliver
On May, 30, 2010, Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum, was quoted in a New York Times article on the Deepwater Horizon explosion: "What the hell did we do to deserve this? Safety is our top priority." These words were spoken by a CEO who seems confused about the disastrous series of events leading to the explosion and who appears naive about the power of words. He declared safety was a top priority and believed he had fulfilled his role as a leader in doing so. He was wrong, and he may not be alone.
Many major oil companies have excellent safety tools, processes and procedures in place and all are regulated by the same agencies. They know safety is good business and that injuring people, damaging the environment and destroying equipment is expensive and painful. These companies spend millions on safety training and equipment, and talk about safety at every level of the organization. Without a doubt, they have all made safety a priority. So what happened?
Could such a tragedy occur in your company? Can anything be done to prevent it? Executives of many companies—within the oil industry and across many others—along with their employees, contractors and family members are asking these questions. Yes, such a tragedy can happen in any organization. And yes, it can be prevented. Everyone from a roustabout swapping out a valve to the CEO is a key player in preventing workplace tragedies. Just what can top-level executives do?
Fifteen people died and 180 were injured in the Texas City, TX, explosion on March 23, 2005. The Baker Panel made 10 recommendations that if implemented can save other companies from similar outcomes. Take action. Assemble a panel of experts to measure the effectiveness of systems in place. Caution all involved not to measure process safety performance in terms of personal injury and illness rates. Many can quote a site's OSHA recordable rate at any given moment, yet most come up empty when asked, for example, how many process hazard analysis maintenance items were resolved in a timely manner in a given week. This signals that improvements can be made.
Identifying safety as a priority means it can move up or down the list as other priorities arise. Priorities change. Core values do not. When safety is integrated as a core value that drives all business decisions, production will be defined as "the safe completion of quality work in a timely manner." Listen to what people say. If phrases such as "we've always done it this way and nothing has happened before" are common, improvements are needed.
Process safety success and personal safety success both depend on an environment in which people are empowered to ask hard questions, admit mistakes without fear of reprisal and make changes needed to ensure safe operations. Do managers have adequate budgets and the authority to use those funds without arduous approval processes? Have managers given up trying to make repairs or replace equipment because their requests are repeatedly rejected? Do employees feel that their concerns go unanswered? If so, improvements are needed.
Do conversations with contractors and employees focus on how many days it has been since an OSHA recordable? Are teams bombarded with this number sewn onto hats, displayed on monitors, printed on
T-shirts and posted on breakroom walls? If this message is not balanced with equally pervasive messages about successful job interventions, specifics about hazard identifications, improvements made to processes, number of near misses investigated and similar metrics, the company is missing a valuable opportunity to focus on the specific behaviors that result in zero incidents.
When workers see extraordinary attention being paid to OSHA statistics yet know that facility permit processes are bypassed or relaxed, maintenance funding is unavailable or procedures are wrong, they question whether management sees the big picture. Choose another way to communicate safety performance or find a better balance. OSHA statistics are an important metric for executive teams, business analysts and the insurance industry, not the workforce.
Effective SH&E organizational structure requires a budget and reporting structure independent from that of operations. Resource allocation choices send a strong message about core values. Are field-level safety professionals involved in prejob planning of routine work or are they in a reactive risk management role, completing incident reports and accompanying injured employees to the clinic? Does the company have enough safety personnel? If not, the company is missing an opportunity to focus a fresh set of eyes on the work and incorporate the perspective of a professional trained to consider what could go wrong.
Each company has thousands of experts who have information that can be used to monitor safety and assess the corporate safety culture. They work in cubicles in the home office. They wear coveralls, steel-toed boots and hardhats on rigs and in facilities. They are highly skilled, proud of their work and want to return home safely each day. Employees are a company's early warning system. Treat them with respect and involve them in assessing systems and identifying areas that need improvement.
On March 23, 2005, 15 people died and 180 were injured in the Texas City Refinery explosion. On April 20, 2010, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon and the nation's worst environmental disaster began to unfold. Everyone has work to do to make sure this does not happen again.
Ashleigh "AL" Oliver is a safety professional with 7 years' field experience in the oil and gas industry, currently working in Alaska, and 20 years' experience managing people. Her field of study is effecting organizational cultural change.
posted here > http://www.asse.org/professionalsafety/best-practices_story1.php
