In 2004, Baker Hughes INTEQ-Norway de-signed and implemented a safety coaching program that builds on the existing safety culture and aims at reinforcing safe behaviors to promote a higher level of safety performance and to avoid the danger of plateauing performance. The program uses motivation, effective communication, and teamwork to achieve its goals.
Baker Hughes provides products and services for drilling, formation evaluation, completion, and production to the worldwide oil and natural gas industry. Its core business involves providing practical and reliable technology to find, develop, produce, and manage oil and gas reservoirs.
The company is structured around product line divisions that share common opportunities in developing and delivering technology solutions during distinct phases of oil and gas exploitation. It has approximately 30,000 employees worldwide, of which 1,000 are employed and stationed in Scandinavia.
Why eXsTO?
Efforts have been made to make working in the oil and gas industry safer; however, accidents and incidents continue to occur. Historically, the focus of safety improvement has been on creating safe work environments and designing safer tools for employees. While these efforts have led to a decrease in accidents and incidents, onshore and offshore accidents and high-potential near-misses remain an actuality. The existence of these circumstances indicates the need for improvements in the approach to safety.
The question arose at Baker Hughes INTEQ-Norway: Why do incidents and accidents occur when the workforce is provided with the safest workplace and safest equipment? A partial answer could be that traditional efforts to improve safety have overlooked one crucial factor in the industry - the workforce itself. The eXsTO coaching program sought to close this perceived gap to increase overall safety performance.
The genesis of eXsTO
eXsTO is Latin and meansto stand forth/out; exist; be extant/visible; be on record, providing a fitting name for the program. More specific to the goals of the program, eXsTO denotes the act to say stop, stand out, be visible, and be present.
Not surprisingly, the program incorporates the three principles of being present, being visible, and being accountable for safe behavior and actions. The program’s fundamental tenet is: “Positive attitudes are worthless unless they are translated into action.”
eXsTO offers coaching to encourage employees to demonstrate the best practices of safe behavior and reinforces individual and group attitudes, teamwork, and communication. It introduces the concept of the collective “safety net” and presents techniques to help employees comprehend underlying mechanisms and ways to reduce the risk of incidents and human errors.
The program rests upon the principle that all individuals within an organization need to work together to create a safe work environment. In this respect, the concept is strongly related to similar “human factor” programs that were implemented in the airline industry throughout the ’90s.
An important underlying concept of the program is that its focus is on the company’s overall safety culture. “Safety culture” has become a much used term in recent years and has been identified as a major contributor to most industrial accidents.
Before being able to enhance safety culture, one must clarify what this broad term describes, which is the subject of some debate. Organizational culture has been defined as consisting of the behavior, actions, and values that people in an enterprise are expected to follow.
Developing eXsTO and its objectives
The author and a small team of safety advisors and psychologists developed eXsTO. Its foundation is the shared expertise related both to offshore and onshore work environments, as well as consideration of issues related to human factors. The primary goals of the program are to increase motivation and teamwork and to create proactive safe behavior by empowering employees to reduce the number of accidents and incidents.
The aim was to create a safety culture that extends outside the workplace and goes beyond the call of duty. The principle is that empowering individuals to effect safety decisions will result in a more safety-conscious workforce. In turn, the overall level of safety will increase, and the safety culture within the organization will continue to develop and strengthen.
By focusing on behaviors and attitudes leading to both safe and unsafe acts, the safety culture concept aims to increase awareness, motivation, and engagement in safety at an individual and personal level. Participants are encouraged to act in a hands-on manner related to their own work.
To achieve this goal, the company set the target that all employees in Scandinavia were to complete the program by 2006.
Implementation
eXsTO was undertaken using the simple recognition, evaluation, and control process from the field of organizational behavior. During the program, practical exercises are undertaken, including role-play, one-/two-way communication, reviewing an internal case study, and sharing real-life stories from the coach’s and participants’ experiences. The participants’ daily work environment forms the basis for the exercises.
Organizational literature has consistently expressed the importance of management commitment to the implementation of safety-related issues. Therefore, the first team to attend the program was INTEQ-Norway senior management. Senior managerial commitment to the programs offered a unique opportunity for them to also be trained in being present, visible, and accountable for safe behaviors.
Subsequently, the decision was made that representatives from this management team were to participate in every coaching session held thereafter. Active involvement by senior management is considered essential in that the participants recognize this innovative program is supported, as are the behaviors and beliefs that it espouses.
The program included mixed teams across the operations of INTEQ at offsite venues where individuals were encouraged to consider the organizational and personal factors that affect safety and their roles in influencing it. While the program has focused mainly on INTEQ employees so far, a number of participants from operating companies in Norway and Denmark and a number of Baker Hughes subcontractors have attended.
Groups of colleagues met over a series of weeks to discuss in detail their own safety behaviors and how those coincide with the norms of the organization’s overall safety culture. Parallels were drawn between behaviors and practices within the oil and gas industry, both specific to INTEQ and more generally (e.g., within the worlds of aviation and sports). The groups’ familiarity with the latter fields facilitated interpretation of how aspects of skilled teamwork, motivation, achievement, and setting objectives could be transferred to the company’s organizational approach to safety. Even though a great responsibility is placed on the individual’s level of awareness and skill development, success is also based on arrangements from the organization and the system surrounding the individual.
The program takes this into account and is based on the humans-technology-organization model of viewing the factors influencing safety.
Feedback
At present, 850 workers have completed the program. By year-end, all INTEQ-Norway employees were scheduled to attend the workshops constituting the program’s Phase 1.
While this program does not exist in isolation, but as part of a comprehensive program, there has been a general decline in accidents across Norway operations since its inception. Apparently, coaching has effectively served as an agent of cultural change to make safe behavior part of everyday life.
Feedback thus far has been positive. The practical communication exercises, for example, have been identified as especially useful and valuable to employees in their daily work. A number of participants have described the sessions as thought-provoking. The challenges provided by the instructors promote discussions that highlight the important relationship between the organization and the individual commitment to safety.
The program has been recognized by operational organizations both nationally and internationally independent of the Baker Hughes organization.
What does the future hold?
The subsequent phase of eXsTO will focus on team motivation and self motivation, proactive behavior, coaching, and teamwork. Working with individuals and smaller groups, instructors will focus even more on specific challenges. One of the significant developments will include expanded use of psychologists within a more detailed form of coaching.
Further development will include efforts to modularize the coaching aspects and to train more instructors. Phase two will deal more actively with eXsTO’s underlying principles related to reliability and reducing human errors by improving design and work methods.
Stein Rønning
INTEQ - Norway
The Humans-Technology-Organization (HTO) Model
The nuclear power industry developed the HTO-concept (Humans-Technology-Organization) in the 1980s. Strong focus was first placed on technical improvements, which resulted in a reduced number of near misses and incidents caused by technical failures. As a result, the incidents caused by humans became more “visible,” as they represented a larger share of the overall accident statistics. Focusing on potential “human error” further improved safety, and the necessity to consider organizational issues became apparent. The HTO-system focuses on all three components to improve safety.
