Alex Buehler, Marshall-Teichert Group, Minneapolis
It was still dark when the lease operator pulled up to the first well on his assigned production route. He grabbed his gauge tape before climbing the stairs to reach the top of the 20-foot oil and water tanks. After lowering the gauge bob into the water tank, he squinted to read the measurement of fluid depth in the water tank. Realizing that he had forgotten to carry along his flashlight to see the gauge reading clearly, he instinctively reached for his cigarette lighter.
Think this couldn't happen in your organization? Chances are, unless safety is a core value securely ingrained into your business culture, it probably already has.
An investigation of this incident confirmed that policy letters clearly prohibited the use of lighters on well site properties; no-smoking signs covered all the required equipment surfaces; and banners across the walls of the office area proclaimed the dangers of open flame or sparks in workplace areas. The operator had a functioning flashlight in the cab of his truck. So what went wrong? And more importantly, how could we have prevented this unsafe behavior?
The root cause of this failure was in the viability of this company's safety culture. Safety was a management priority geared only toward regulatory compliance, and competed against other needs of the business such as time, accuracy, and production. The absence of a robust safety culture poses significant risks to the company's bottom line and business reputation. Consider the following costs:
- Statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that annual fatalities in the oil & gas industry have exceeded 100 per year over the past five years. Contractor field support activities accounted for about one-half of those fatal work injuries. During the same period, the number of recordable non-fatal lost-time injuries averaged 4,000, with a median lost time duration of 30 days. The lost-time costs alone associated with these deaths and injuries equates to nearly 1% of the $260 billion annual revenue from our industry. This does not even include the costs associated with fines or lawsuits.
- Not surprisingly, the cost of spills and environmental damage, which often accompany fatalities and injuries, contribute to a ten-fold loss of revenue for the oil and gas industry. The $20 billion cleanup bill from last year's Gulf of Mexico incident bears testimony to this expense. Add to that the impact on the bottom line from loss of good will and detrimental limitations imposed by additional government regulatory costs. As an industry, the behavior of one firm can result in expensive consequences for the entire industry.
In his 1979 release of the book, "Quality is Free," esteemed author Philip Crosby outlined his premise that zero defects could be achieved without the expense of inspection resources by changing the management culture of a business organization to one of continuous improvement. Crosby's approach is very applicable to the field of workplace safety, particularly to eliminate injuries and incidents through standardized work processes and controls.
Enhancing your business culture requires a change-management approach, but here are some cost-free and expedient methods for gauging the effectiveness of the safety culture in your workplace and whether it is working proactively to prevent injury, reduce or eliminate hazards; as well as ways to develop or improve your existing program.
Safety training; instruction
A proactive safety culture suggests involvement by all levels of the organization. One of the quickest ways to a stagnant safety and environmental program is the lack of interactive meetings and training sessions regarding safety topics. What does your required safety training look like? Normally held on cross-over days with both shifts on hand, the entire organization huddles into the maintenance bay or conference room to listen to a safety topic selected by the safety department manager. The meeting is likely a one-way communication event with no engagement from the audience. If the people sitting 10 rows back from the speaker are not struggling to keep their eyes open, they are conversing with their fellow employees and paying little attention to the topic being presented. You have their signatures on the sign-in sheet proving they attended the training, but have you done anything to impact the safety culture to seriously engage your workforce?
We have probed the knowledge retention of employees following monthly safety meetings, which included lunch as part of the meeting. Four hours after the meeting, only 50% of those polled could remember the safety topic that was discussed, but 100% could remember what was served for lunch. A full day following such a meeting, the percentages dropped to 30% and 80%, respectively.
There are two useful techniques to address these shortfalls. The first is to address meeting size. We all know that it is more difficult to "hide" in smaller groups. Why does the entire organization need to attend one large weekly or monthly safety meeting? Try scheduling smaller meetings on different days of the week; both attention span and interaction will improve. The other successful technique is to build in participation requirements. This could include tests prior to the training, followed by tests afterward. Be sure to design the pre-test in a multiple-choice format and the post-test with written answer requirements. The beauty of this approach is that it will help you quickly identify areas where additional coaching and reinforcement is needed.
Asking frontline supervisors or operators to lead or facilitate safety meetings or training is a great way to build ownership and accountability among all ranks in the organization. Do not let a lack of PowerPoint or computer skills be an obstacle to this opportunity; that is where administrative staff is useful. Utilize the knowledge your frontline people have of their workplace processes and hazards to accumulate content for a training class, even if it is through handwritten notes. You will be surprised how much higher the retention rate is for a peer-led meeting or training session.
Consider establishing a workplace safety committee which addresses issues and decisions related to safety and environmental controls. Membership on this committee should come from all levels of the organization to ensure a balanced viewpoint relating to actions requiring decisions or judgment. Exposure to this level of decision making can have a lasting effect on individuals serving on the committee. Be sure to rotate membership periodically to ensure participation by as many willing employees as possible. That way, it will not become an "additional duty" burden, but rather a learning experience for up-and-coming employees.
Job permits, JSAs
Job permits facilitate the communication of potential hazards related to services being performed on equipment where electric, hydraulic or pneumatic power and sources of ignition may need to be isolated. Typically, lock-out/tag-out procedures are followed to ensure visibility for all parties, especially those not directly involved in the work being performed, to ensure a safe service operation.
What good is a job permit or a job safety analysis (JSA) if it is pre-written by a clerk and then handed to the contractor or technician for a signature before beginning the work? Certainly you have met the OSHA paperwork requirement, but there has been little impact to your safety culture. The "A" in JSA stands for analysis and implies a communication effort much greater than simply requiring a signature. Yet, we have seen dozens of examples of this occurance at nearly every organization with which we have worked. The time spent reviewing and discussing the hazards should take longer than the time it takes to get a signature.
How secure can we feel about our safety culture if our job permits and JSAs are mere paper exercises? Even if the job permit or JSA is for a consecutive day on the same project, it does not mean additional hazards have not been noticed or intensified. The five-minute conversation prior to beginning or continuing work is certainly cheaper than the cost of a lost-time accident or damage to equipment or to the environment.
The stop work authority
Nearly all safety programs have a documented stop-work authority letter which informs employees and contractors that they are authorized to halt all work activities if they sense an unsafe condition during a work operation. This authority is easy for our leaders to exercise. They are accustomed to guiding and coaching others. The problem is they are not always the ones at the work sites watching every aspect of the job at hand. Another challenge is that many of our frontline operators and contractors are uncomfortable standing in front of a group of people, much less getting up the nerve to stop an entire work site. A confidential study conducted by our group revealed that nearly 25% were unwilling to speak-up to stop a work process activity that appeared too hazardous because of perceived pressure or ridicule from fellow employees or supervisors.
One way to overcome this is by asking selected frontline employees to deliver testimonials in front of training classes and other group sessions about their own experiences using the stop-work authority. It will ease the fear factor much more quickly than the posting of a letter, no matter how high the ranking of its signature. If our people in refineries, on offshore rigs, or out in the field were more observant and confident about invoking the stop-work authority, we would have far fewer fatalities and injuries.
The hidden cost of oilfield contractors
The challenge of maintaining an effective safety-minded culture in the workplace is magnified significantly by all the contractors who come to work on our property each day. Typically, the number of contractors working in an oilfield or refinery is at least triple the number of direct employees on any given day. This makes the need for employee vigilance and observant behavior an even higher priority in order to prevent injuries, fatalities or incidents. At a minimum, we try to minimize unsafe behavior by our contractors through the use of Master Service Agreements, but this becomes an even more daunting task when our contractors hire sub-contractors to carry out certain, often specialty, work assignments. We often have no agreement in place to control subcontractors, and yet, this population can be the source of highest risk behavior resulting in at least one-half the recordable incidents for a typical oil and gas producer.
On a drilling site in southwestern Wyoming, prior to what should have been a routine rig move to a new location, we saw the results of not following a standard operating procedure and not having properly reviewed the JSA. The subcontract crew needed to move the compressor module (sometimes called a grasshopper), which has an asymmetrical center of gravity. Lifting of this module onto a flatbed of a tractor trailer required a crane with spreader bars, as specified in the contractor's own standard operating procedure. A crane and spreader bars were not even onsite as the crew started their rig-move. They attempted to "pull" the grasshopper onto the flatbed using the power winch from the tractor trailer. During this attempt, the module toppled over to one side and was damaged. A crane should have been onsite as part of the movement crew, or the crew should have waited for one to arrive. There were no injuries, but the equipment damage cost the drilling rig crew an additional week for repairs to the critical piece of equipment. In fact, two of the crew polled confidentially after this incident mentioned that they felt this attempted operation was unsafe, but both failed to call for a stop work on it.
A good way to significantly reduce this risk is through higher visibility of the on-site management there for observations and job audits. Master Service Agreements should include expectations about a contractor or subcontractor's safety and environmental program. Your agreements should address the necessity of these entities to have their own demonstrable internal program promoting a safety culture through observations and metrics, and include the potential of an audit by your safety department to ensure compliance.
Metrics, reporting
As with any other area of performance, your people are more responsive to metrics they can control. You would not give your lease operators a copy of the annual report and expect them to know how to reduce operating expenses. Why then do we simply publish only the division or company-level safety and environmental performance indicators and expect things to improve?
When you look at the team level of your organization, you will see an environment where the individual lease operator, maintenance technician or roustabout can actually influence the behavior of fellow employees. It is at this level that key performance indicators must be published and then rolled-up to successive management and executive leadership levels.
A good place to start is by setting expectations for job observations, SCORE cards and safety training attendance numbers, and then measuring them on a weekly basis. Remember that your frontline employees exist in a daily/weekly activity-based world, where monthly and quarterly figures are distant memories on PowerPoint charts and graphs.
Metrics should be posted in team-level areas so that rewards can be provided or corrective-actions taken immediately after the performance is recorded. Decide upon levels of recognition for intermediate goals so that successes can be celebrated and the right behavior reinforced.
The bottom line
An effective safety program addresses the corporate culture and strives proactively to identify and analyze safety hazards inherent in each job process. For continuous improvement to take place, each individual's behavior must reflect ownership of a stakeholder in the safety program, as well as an instinctive degree of caution in everyday job functions for themselves and their colleagues… just like looking both ways before crossing a street. In effect, it means that each person is more motivated to watch out for the safety of others in his/her organization.
The oil and gas industry will never cease to be an unsafe work environment, but reducing the rate of fatalities, injuries, and incidents could help to limit the additional costs imposed by increased regulation and more outside control by government agencies. It's time to consider the all the numbers in safety.
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