This paper describes how an oilfield services company in Colombia implemented a new program to complement its traditional safety training, to ensure that new recruits receive not only health, safety and environment (HSE) knowledge but also a strong message from the company about the safety culture inherent in its values.The HSE culture maturity model developed by the oil and gas industry indicates that having a management system is necessary yet not always sufficient to ensure continuous improvement. The authors argue that companies consider a more integral approach and take into account human behavior, corporate values and the culture forming the environment in which the company operates.This integral approach requires a long term strategy allowing some time to pass before the company can see changes in its HSE performance. This becomes challenging when a company enters a period of growth with high staff turnover. In that case, the company needs to be more creative to ensure the full integration of the new employees into its safety culture. This paper examines a program developed for new employees to get them involved in the building of houses for underprivileged families in the communities where the company operates. Each employee receives comprehensive HSE training prior to starting the project. The program objectives include providing new employees with opportunities for community outreach, management visibility and teamwork as well as the hands-on HSE training to give the new employees a chance to put acquired HSE knowledge into practice and demonstrate competency before being exposed to the front line risks of the industry. This paper also describes how the program contributes to the company's long term strategy to minimize HSE risks and develop a more mature HSE culture.
Health problems faced by employees in the oilfield sector broaden to common and prevalent pathologies that have a higher incidence than in the general population, such as overweight, dyslipidemia (elevation of the lipids in the blood), blood hypertension, and high psychological stress levels, among others.Some of these health problems have clear modifiable factors, for which is possible to effectively intervene in a low-cost manner, obtaining a short-term positive outcome.Medical problems resulting from inadequate eating habits and lack of opportunities to develop a regular physical activity program, particularly in field operations, make overweight and obesity and hyperlipidemias constitute a main biological risk factor for people working in this industry.Health statistics from a multinational oilfield services company operating in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador show that one out of two employees presents a high cardiovascular risk as a result of these factors. This paper discusses the initiatives taken to reduce this specific cardiovascular risk at the oilfield services company. The Healthy Heart program focused on two of the factors noted: healthy eating habits and regular physical activity.Some of the strategies implemented to achieve both nutritional and physical goals are analyzed. This paper discusses potential benefits for employees and the company: for personnel, implementing healthy, useful and motivating strategies, and for the company, investing in low-cost approaches to control potential expenditure associated with problems derived from these diseases and their biological, psychosocial, and economic consequences.The paper discusses the initial results and benefits of the Healthy Heart program.
The oil and gas industry has reached a plateau in many of its health, safety, and environment (HSE) indicators. Statistics show that over the last five years the industry has not experienced a significant reduction in either the number or severity of accidents, despite the investment of considerable effort and money. Influencing employee behavior has been identified as the key factor for resuming performance improvement, with several organizations adopting systems to tackle the challenge using behavior-based safety programs. In the opinion of the authors, most of these programs have had limited effectiveness due their being implemented in isolation, rather than integrated into an overall management system. This paper shows how a corporate program in an oilfield services company has been fully integrated into the organization's HSE culture with an innovative approach: humanizing the management system. The paper describes the vision and strategy to bring implementation of the management system to a more mature level by measuring changes in managers' leadership styles and by using a bottom-up approach that allows employees to participate in the system and, at the same time, feel accountable for the actions they take. This approach requires putting tactical programs in place to make managers believe in the change and make employees believe in the system. The paper shows examples of these programs, such as a commitment and leadership key performance indicator (KPI) for managers; a weekly positive message to create an "it's possible" way of thinking across the organization; and a program to build a bridge between the families of employees and the system. The paper also describes the key principles that make the approach of humanizing the management system effective, and shows how it is improving HSE performance in the operations of the oilfield services company in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.
Research shows that human factors have contributed to several industrial incidents, from high frequency to low severity injuries to catastrophic events involving multiple fatalities. The oil and gas industry has recognized that reducing the impact of human error in the reliability of upstream operations is imperative. This paper explores the application of the behavior science on land rigs at an oilfield services company and includes examples from operations in four countries in the Middle East and Latin America. The first phase of the initiative identified critical workflows, tasks and critical behaviors. These were measured for potential variances. A critical workflow, in respect to personal safety, was tubular and tool handling on the rig floor. To establish a baseline performance, the variability from expected safe behaviors of rig crew members was measured. By applying the principles of behavior science an intervention was conducted including feedback and reinforcement of desired behaviors. Direct and indirect observations by HSE supervisors were used to study behaviors and prepare structured feedback reports. Initial baseline measurements of behavior demonstrated significant levels of variance. Increased adherence to expected and desired behaviors was observed with changes to the work environment. Providing soon and certain feedback to the crews to reinforce desired behaviors led to significant and sustainable improvements in performance. Enhanced procedural adherence resulted in zero rig floor safety incidents while handling tubulars and tools for the operations involved in the initiative, some of them since 2014. The results of this initiative demonstrate the success of behavior science application to safety critical work tasks on a rig floor.
Authors use behavior science to help organizations maximize human performance through a cost-effective and sustainable approach. Such approach is based on transformational leaders and employees’ engagement, so they embrace a humanized management system by conviction, not by imposition. This paper shows how to use organizational psychology principles in real case applications, resulting in holistic business improvements, including financial, safety and service quality performance. The authors developed the Engineering Human Performance (EHP) methodology, by improving the Behavior Engineering Methodology (Lopez, et. al., 2020) to help organizations achieve outstanding and sustainable levels of human performance. Over the last ten years, this methodology was successfully applied to more than 50 business processes in an oilfield services company. The EHP four-stages process uses frontline employees’ wisdom to identify sources of behavioral variance, measure adherence to expected behaviors and formulate changes to the operational context to pursue high levels of procedural adherence, sustainably. EHP incorporated statistic models to demonstrate its significant impact to business results, using a fit-for-purpose digital platform. A combination of a coaching program for managers to embrace a leading with purpose approach (Sinek, 2020), and workshops with the front-line associates, generate a healthy flow of communication across the organization. The leading with purpose program improves managers’ leadership by voluntarily selecting and engineering transformational behaviors they adapt and adopt to improve the effectiveness of their leadership style. The impact of the program is measured for statistical significance by applying the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (Boss, Avolio, 1996) before the coaching program starts, and 90 days after the last session. Workshops with front-line associates use scientific principles to understand the sources of behavioral variance and formulate intervention plans that drive procedural adherence by conviction, not by imposition. An innovative element of EHP is the ‘behavior empowerment center (BEC)’. The BEC coordinates the systematic measurement of adherence to critical behaviors in the front-line, captures and verifies statistical significance of the data, analyzes trends, and prepares reports depicting the levels of behavioral adherence, so crews receive soon, certain, and positive feedback on a regular basis. This feedback loop elicits levels of adherence above 90%, sustainably, and eliminates losses associated to behavioral variance. The BEC uses a unique digital platform designed to bring consistency to the feedback loop to front-line employees and managers. A case study is used to exemplify how EHP is being applied by a major rig company, to improve human performance in workover operations. The paper illustrates the remarkable results of the leading with purpose program and describes the Stages 1 (select processes that are causing loss), 2 (behavior analysis), 3 (baseline and intervention) and Stage 4 (scale-up) of the EHP methodology. Authors consider that EHP offers an innovative, and cost-effective approach to helping organizations maximize human performance, in a systematic and sustainable manner. The application of the methodology shall not be limited to the oil and gas industry, as the focus on incorporating the human factor to inconsistently applied processes is affecting many industries, if not all. The main challenge faced by authors in the implementation of the methodology is management commitment. Some managers expect improvement programs to bring immediate results, which could undermine the sustainability of the benefits. EHP grants sustainable improvements, provided the organization is committed to scale-up the program until results are significant. Achieving these milestones require time (from 6 months to 2 years), resources, and persistency. The leading with purpose program has proven effective in getting the proper levels of management commitment, to support EHP and deliver outstanding results. The paper shows a statistically significant improvement in the leadership style of the management team and how it is helping the business of the case-study company. As for the way forward, authors are exploring options to incorporate artificial intelligence into the behavioral measurement, not to replace the face-to-face interactions, but to increase the accuracy of the behavioral measurement and speed up the feedback loop.
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