Emergency management planning has matured in the oil and gas industry over the last 30 years. As part of such planning, essential personnel— or employees who stay on the job when everyone else is leaving— perform vital tasks to mitigate risks related to human security, loss of assets, and damage to the environment. This paper defines the specific problems related to maintaining business continuity while dealing with the human issue of moving families of employees out of volatile yet sensitive security zones. Companies can use managed approaches to identify families of employees who stay on the job, meet their evacuation needs, and devise methods by which employees and their families can communicate with one another during evacuations and other emergencies. Employees, confident their families are safe, can then focus on the critical business tasks at hand, and once families are relocated, people outside the emergency zone can render aid and comfort. This paper discusses the challenges that decision-makers, workers, and families in the industry face when implementing or following crisis and emergency response procedures during real-life evacuations. In some evacuations, industry health, safety and environment (HSE) personnel have to move quickly to analyze each situation, apply crisis management tools, secure sensitive assets, and evacuate staff and their families. In a large global company, the business-phased return for one country can coincide with the evacuation from another. The paper also adds historical context to the evolution of emergency and crisis management communication and planning through analysis of a series of interviews with people in the oilfield industry who were involved in past evacuations. The analysis draws parallels and differences between then and now, identifying best practices and also potential challenges for the future.
In our own "search for sustainable excellence," we look at how one leading service company addresses health and safety for families of their employees. We examine management processes, social support, and extension of these methods for Youth and Community. The Past: The Missing LinkIn the oil and gas industry, most people would agree that, since the beginning of the business, expatriate employees and their families have been well cared for. Employees on transfer, now as in the past, generally head off to their new job and leave the family behind to arrange their move with the company or relocation contractor. Before leaving for the job site, the company probably gave the employee some printed material to review. He would be educated about health risks, such as Malaria; warned not to drink the water; and given other security details about his new home. This information he tucked into his (and in the past, let's face it, it was usually "his") suitcase for reading later. In the new location, the employee arrived at his office or job site and promptly received a briefing about health and safety. Off to work and busy with the new job, employees would often neglect to share any of that vital information with their spouses before the big move. Left to their own resources, expatriate spouses commonly refer to their employee partner as the "missing link" when it comes to getting health, safety, and security information about their own moves. TodayCompanies are improving and beginning to recognize the value of the family as a stakeholder in the relocation process. In the case of a leading service company, spouses are considered a highly valued resource, a partner in the relocation experience. Quality, Health, Safety and Environment (QHSE) and Human Resources (HR), have collaborated with the spouses themselves to develop standard management guidelines for working with the company's volunteer spouses association. This association is now 20 years in existence. For this service company, relocation experiences for families are a top priority. Welcoming and compassion for the needs of the relocating family are core values. Consequently, with buy-in at top management levels in the company and dedication by a revolving global board of spouse volunteers, spouses find solutions to common problems for themselves and each other, have a strong bond with management at both global and local levels, and are even proving to be a useful communication medium for QHSE to get health and safety information to employees via alternative communication channels. Our Future TogetherDedicated to a continuing commitment to assist employees, contractors, and spouses with the unique difficulties associated with a mobile, global workforce, the company plans to use QHSE expertise developed for the employee to create new health and safety programs to educate and train 11-to 18-year-old children of employees as well as local children in communities where the employees work and live. This health and safety program for youth will use, maximize, and redevelop ...
TX 75083-3836, U.S.A., fax 01-972-952-9435. AbstractSpouses of corporate expatriate employees form distributed communities that are more similar to one another than the cultures to which they are expatriated. Expatriate employees move frequently and many may not be repatriated for an entire generation. Expatriate children are often born out of their home country and are educated in the international arena.Fifteen years ago a leading service company recognized the challenges facing expatriate spouses and, as a result, formed the Schlumberger Spouses Association (SSA). The SSA serves as a social and community outreach organization that now has 7,500 members. The organization operates in 54 countries and has 114 chapters. In this paper we present the initial SSA pilot program and show how it has grown into a worldwide outreach and support network that also reaches out to local communities.We will also discuss partnerships that the SSA has built: partnerships among organizations of interest to expatriate spouses, spousal organizations from other corporations, and partnerships within local communities. These partnerships have sought to improve the well being of expatriate communities and in particular, address communication issues.In 1996, Schlumberger developed a pilot program to provide 20 spouses in four cities e-mail accounts and dial-up access to the company intranet. By 2003 the popular program, dubbed "SpouseConnect," has grown to more than 3,600 users. Additional growth has been achieved by giving the SSA a secure Web portal and dedicated directory services. This communication tool is also used to disseminate health, safety, and environmental information quickly and effectively. Through SpouseConnect, the SSA is effectively a "small town," whose inhabitants happen to live all over the world.
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