I received the following editorial of NTI safety net quarter 2010 from our HSE division which of thought provoking.
This is something we need to reflect during the forthcoming new year. Let us start make resolutions.
A time for reflection – Management and Workforce.
As this editorial is written, in 2010 8 more people have died in relation to our operations and 69 members of our workforce have suffered injury at work. This is a completely unacceptable situation. How has this happened? Why is the accident rate starting to rise again?
Any accident investigation carried out properly will identify that one or more of the underlying causes trace back to how HSE is managed in the organisation by management – whether supervisors, managers or executives or any combination of them. Whenever someone is hurt, management needs to accept its part in what happened, and implement change that addresses the underlying cause to avoid a repetition.
To make sure that all levels of management carry out their safety role in a visible and felt way, Safety Leadership programs were introduced in late 2009. Over 3000 supervisors, managers and executives have now attended these workshops with NTI and others in the last 15 months – that’s nearly 6% of the entire pan-PDO workforce. On the courses, every one of the delegates declared to their colleagues the personal action they would now take as Safety Leaders – what they would stop doing, and what they would start to do, like starting to demonstrate better, safer behaviours to their workforce.
Why has the required improvement in safety leadership not happened then? Were the declarations just a set of easily spoken words? Or is there something deeper involved? Every company is focused on keeping its costs down, and implementing new safety initiatives may be seen by many in management as another cost (introduced by PDO) that produces nothing, and affects the bottom line adversely. Let’s just examine that statement and the possible mindset behind it.
In 1995, the Health & Safety Executive in the UK carried out a study on the cost of accidents at work including the oil and gas industry. We can all learn something from their findings, particularly as the costs in the document need to be adjusted upwards for 15 years of inflationary factors.
During accident investigations, insurers in Oman now establish whether their insured client has fulfilled its legal responsibilities under the OSH Regulations. If not, the insurers are apparently, refusing to meet the insurance claim – the losses are therefore even greater than the HSE’s findings.
Here in Oman, PDO’s oil and gas industry involves construction and transport industry operations on a large scale.
The HSE’s 18 week study found that in construction there were over 3750 near misses for every single accident. That’s 3750 opportunities to prevent an accident from happening. The study established that accidents or potential accidents over the life of the contract would have produced a loss of 8.5% of the contract value. For every OMR 1 of insured loss, there are OMR 11 uninsured losses when an accident occurs.
In transport operations, the cost of accidents represented 37% of annual profits to the company. Uninsured losses were eight times higher than insured losses. Although there have been remarkable improvements in LTIs and fatalities associated with transport operations in Oman, they do still occur, and so do these losses.
With oil and gas operations in particular, for every LTI or fatality there are 126 near misses – 126 missed opportunities to prevent the accident from happening. Again, the HSE’s study identified that for every OMR 1 uninsured loss associated with an accident, there are OMR 11 lost to uninsured losses. In 84 non-injury accidents, the losses amounted to OMR 225,000 before inflationary adjustment.
The HSE’s study findings only tell part of the story. The losses that cannot be easily quantified are probably the most significant, long-lived and far-reaching. The pain, suffering and trauma that every injured party suffers; the stress and suffering that the members of their immediate family suffer – sometimes for weeks and months afterwards; the stress and upset caused to the extended family members and work colleagues of the injured party; the loss of reputation to the company and the effect this may have on obtaining future contracts.
The recognition, reporting of, and acting upon unsafe behaviours or conditions in the workplace are opportunities we are collectively missing. If every member of management was consistently visible and felt in the workplace; always turning up in the right way; engaging the workforce on a personal level in the right way; demonstrating the right behaviours; coaching and mentoring those who do not yet know the right way of doing things; the workforce would follow the example set. ‘I can see the boss does it this way and I want to keep him happy, so that’s the way I’ll do it too”.
The HSE training changes introduced in 2009 focused on making the workforce and management aware of the safe behaviours that are required to keep the workplace safe. These need to be consistently driven by the leadership in all companies in our operations – not by PDO ‘policing’ it. The increasing LTIs and fatalities causing huge losses, many of them uninsured, is a reflection of the Safety Leadership being demonstrated by supervisors managers and executives. If accidents are rising, effective Safety Leadership is declining. We MUST do better.
The HSE’s study has shown that consistent, visible and felt Safety Leadership is a lot less costly, in every sense, than dealing with losses caused by accidents, injuries, and all of the associated activities.
What can we do in 2011 to change the rising trend in LTIs and fatalities?
· Be a consistently positive safety role model to all those you work with.
· Do things the right way, not because PDO tells you to, but because it’s the right thing to do.
· Drive yourself and every member of your management team (CEO to front line supervisor) to be a visible and felt Safety Leader – get involved and be seen to be doing it.
· Show appreciation for safe working and coach and mentor those that do not yet know how.
· Create a safety culture that blames no-one, but does hold people responsible and accountable in a fair and open way.
· Regularly assess the HSE competence of your workforce to ensure they apply at work what they learn on HSE courses.
· Encourage staff to report unsafe conditions and behaviours; act promptly to correct the issue.
· Look for opportunities to do things more safely – it’s much more cost-effective than having an accident.
· Learn from every incident and communicate the learning to your workforce.
Collectively, we can all contribute to an improving safety performance in the workplace. If every one of us simply applied what we learn on HSE courses we attend, and followed the 3 Golden Rules, without exception – Comply – Intervene – Respect, accidents would disappear from our industry.
In every case of 2010’s LTI’s, at least one of the party’s involved – manager, supervisor or worker - failed to comply or intervene.
The solution is in our own hands. A New Year is upon us. We CAN and must do better.
Ian Bowen HLD8
PDO Corporate Adviser
HSE Training & Competence
