Introduction

The oil and gas industry was started by visionaries and wildcatters who foresaw a brighter future and werewilling to scrap the status quo and take steps to achieve their vision. For the industry to reposition itself forthe future today, it needs an injection of the same willingness to cast aside some strongly held legacy beliefsand practices and take the next leap forward—achieving zero harm.

The concept of zero harm is not a new one in the oil and gas industry, which has for more than two decades set HSE goals that are focused on the reduction of incidents with the ultimate intended outcome that no one be hurt and no releases occur. However, the challenge for decades has been the alignment of industry on an effective pathway to achieve these goals. To attain zero harm, a step change in thinking, performance, and alignment around HSE is required across the industry.

It is acknowledged that some believe directing attention toward achieving zero harm can lead to a detrimental focus on incidents and injuries that may lead to underreporting of incidents, gaming of statistics, manipulation of incident definitions, and overly aggressive injury case management.

A zero vision is a commitment. It is a modernist commitment, inspired by Enlightenment thinking, that is driven by the moral appeal of not wanting to do harm and making the world a better place. It is also driven by the modernist belief that progress is always possible, that we can continually improve, always make things better.

Between 2009 and 2016, SPE facilitated a series of global sessions to develop ideas for the continued improvementof HSE in the industry. These sessions brought together leaders representing diverse disciplinesfrom across the industry, government, and academia to discuss a simple question: How can the oil and gasindustry achieve zero harm?

The participants of the SPE sessions identified that achieving and sustaining zero harm relies on the industry’speople and the factors that influence the interaction of people with each other, with the facilitiesand equipment,and with the management systems and working practices used to organize and manage theway work is carried out within the industry. These criteria are described as human factors; identified by theSPE session participants as the priority component for the industry’s success in meeting an expectation ofzero harm.

In addition, ensuring an industrywide commitment to the expectation of zero harm and integrating elementsof human factors to improve human performance were recognized as important steps for the evolution of oiland gas companies to becoming high-reliability organizations (HROs). An evaluationof the characteristics of HROs and how they can be applied to oil and gas drilling organizations foundthat numerous HRO attributes, including human factors, readily align with the challenges that exist in drillingoperations and that impact performance.

Achieving a Culture of Perfection Led From the Top

Many in the oil and gas industry today recognize HSE as adding business and shareholder value. Likewise,leaders in HROs recognize HSE as essential and fundamental to short-term and long-term sustainable success.In fact, the impact of poor HSE practices can drive companies out of business. HSE performance becomesan integral part of our ethical, legal, and social responsibility to our employees, customers, contractors,the communities in which we work, and to the future of our planet.

Zero harm as an expectation will require a cultural adjustment for the industry. Patrick Hudson’s Safety Culture

Maturity Model (Hudson 2001) is a recognized framework used by organizations to assess and understand their culture. Getting to Zero sessions, the Hudson model was adapted to evaluate HSE culture and risk tolerance (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1—Culture/risk tolerance adaptation of Hudson’s Safety Culture Maturity Model.

Participants at the SPE Getting to Zero sessions identified that anevolution to a generative mindset is emerging within their companies, for both HSE culture and risk tolerance (Fig 2). Specifically,

·    Two-thirds (69%) identified their organizations as having a proactive/generative HSE cultural mindset 50% proactive/19% generative.

·    Three-quarters (78%) identified their organizations as having a risk-tolerance mindset of being naturally proactive/generative: 72% proactive/6% generative.

Fig. 2—HSE culture and risk tolerance survey results from SPE Getting to Zero sessions

An indicative of the culture across the industry of the ability to achieve an expectation of zero harm are the present attention and action that are being given to incidents. As a frame of reference, incidents are categorized as fatalities, lost-time injuries, medical cases, first-aid, high-potential, and near-miss. When asked what level of safety incidents trigger their company’s incident analysis and attention, the participants reported the following (Fig. 3).

More than one-third of the session participants identified that in their organizations all incidents receive analysis and attention regardless of outcome severity.

Ø  For nearly one-half of the participants, high-potential incidents initiate action in their organizations.

Ø  The small remainder of participants limit their analysis and attention to traditional incident metrics (that is, fatalities, lost time, medical cases, and first aids).

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Fig. 3—Management of HSE incidents—survey results from SPE Getting to Zero sessions

Organizational and personal accountability mindsets are now more prevalent, causing pre-emptive challengeof conditions and behaviors, because the recognition and perception of risk have increased and tolerance forrisk has decreased. This supports Patrick Hudson’s research that organizations shift their tolerance/perceptionof risk as they evolve upward on his culture ladder (Hudson 2001).

To continue this cultural evolution across the entire industry, the critical component to instilling and ensuringthe necessary change rests with leadership behaviors. Andrew Hopkins states, “a company may expend hugeresources trying to change the way operators, foremen, and supervisory staff think and feel about safety, buta far more effective approach is to instill a culture of This is the way we do things around here.

Organizational culture reflects the shared, tacit assumptions that have come to be taken forgranted and that determine members’ daily behavior. The subset of assumptions about safetyin an organization can be loosely labeled safety culture, encompassing the organization’s values,beliefs, attitudes, social norms, rules, practices, competencies, and behaviors regardingsafety (National Academy of Sciences 2016).

Finding ways to translate learnings from other industries into action in the oil and gas industry has not beeneasy. An oil and gas service provider enlisted leaders as HSE owners by developing an HSE leadership programfor senior managers. The program used findings from previous psychologicalresearch on the role of managerial leadership in determining workplace safety outcomes, and applied theantecedent-behavior-consequence (ABC) model (The aim of the program was to increaseHSE leadership by senior and middle managers and thereby accelerate the development of a strong HSE culture.

The scope of the HSE leadership program was to increase managers’ and senior managers’ operationalownership of HSE and provide “line of sight” as to what effective HSE leadership is and how to apply it todaily activities.The first phase of success was commitment from senior management outside the HSE function to endorse theHSE leadership program. If this commitment was not present and the training was not perceived to be integral to the business, the participants in the course would not recognize the importance of the training. Further, thegoal of achieving a strong culture through operational ownership of HSE would be undermined.

To ensure this critical aspect of success, a series of executive sessions was conducted for the executive leadershipteams of the organization to ensure their commitment and involvement in the program. Members ofthe executive leadership team were active participants in the sessions and defined their expectations for participantsfollowing their completion of the program.

The program’s effectiveness was realized at various levels of the company. The executive leadership awarenessand commitment drove an increase in their level of accountability and ownership. The direct reports ofthose attending the leadership sessions reported an increased awareness and improved HSE behaviors. The participants themselves were the instigators of the cultural change of their supervisors and their subordinates.

In summary, the results demonstrated that the HSE leadership program had a positive impact on the operational ownership of HSE.

Programs like the one described in the preceding have been implemented with varying levels of success in several oil and gas companies. In each case, the impact/success of the program was directly related to the level of senior-operational-management involvement in the process. In short, effective and engaged leadership matters.

What Do We Do as an Industry?

1. Shift from “zero as a goal” to “zero as an expectation.” In the 1990s, leading companies in our industry defined a goal of zero harm (for example, Exxon’s “Nobody Gets Hurt,” Shell’s “Goal Zero,” and BP’s “No accidents, no injuries, and no harm to the environment”); the ultimate outcome of these efforts would be that no one is hurt and no releases occur. These goal-driven visions forced a step change in the reduction of injuries and spills, but despite these improvements, catastrophic incidents—fatal injuries and major releases—occur in our industry at a persistent frequency today.

If we can agree as an industry that zero harm is an attainable expectation, then we will commit to undertakethe necessary step change to ensure that it is attained and sustained.Individual companies and organizations should review their safety visions and workforcesafety messaging to clarify that zero harm is not an ultimate goal, but is an immediate expectation.

2. Continue to progress the application of human factors. The cultural shift to being proactive, and ultimately to being generative, is causing healthy questioning of how the industry has managed HSE.

The industry should standardize on a set of leading indicators that measure the degree to which humanfactors are being used in our industry. This would necessitate a common view of human factors.

Duringthe peer review of this report, it was evident that the views of human factors and their successful applicationin the oil and gas industry vary considerably across the field of human-factors technical experts. Continuingthe discussion and sharing how human factors can be and have been successfully applied acrossthe industry’s operations will benefit the entire industry and improve the likelihood that the industry, notjust individual companies, will achieve the expectation of zero harm.

Once we have a common understanding concerning human factors, we can develop a common vocabularyand we can begin to drive a consistent industry culture that will help all companies with considerationssuch as resource planning and competencies. We will be able to regularly include human-factors assessmentsin such things as hazard and operability studies/hazard-identification studies and equivalent tools/processes so we can identify shortcomings in the understanding of the engineered process. Incident investigationsand root-cause analysis can include a common set of human-factors attributes that would allowcompanies to better understand contributing factors in events that go well beyond the often-cited and yetnarrow assessment that someone did not follow process or that the event was caused by operator error

3. De-emphasize lagging performance indicators and use leading indicators.As an industry, we have become adept at gathering performance on lagging indicators (events that have occurred) vs. leading indicators (risk-control measures). It is easy to measure safety by counting injuries, but much more complicated to measure (and set targets for) effective controls to reduce or eliminate risk. While the emphasis on lagging indicators has brought significant improvement in recordable injury rates, the pressure exerted by focusing on incidents as a performance measure is yielding diminishing returns, to the point that incident rates are no longer a reliable indicator of a company’s safety program (OSHA 2012).

Lagging indicators, such as total recordable incident rates, should not be the primary basis to assess safetyperformance. Instead, to promote a more accurate measure of HSE performance, and to focus the industry’sefforts on safeguard effectiveness and risk reduction, we should use a balance of lagging and leadingindicators to measure the effectiveness of our programs.

4. Optimize collaboration across companies and crews. The oil and gas industry is made up of numerous operating companies, service companies, vendors, contractors, and subcontractors—all interrelated and all needing to interface seamlessly to operate safely. With a workforce guided by a myriad of safety management systems and processes and procedures unique to each organization, working in alignment—and working safely—is a challenge. We need to improve how our individual companies collaborate with each other.

Efforts to standardize HSE requirements are already happening in various ways.

Ø  Standardization of requirements within a single enterprise streamlines implementation of safety programs between major projects.

Ø  Standardization of requirements between operators within a single region (such as in the Gulf of Mexico) can simplify training and assurance for vendors working for various operators—including individual workers who may continuously move from platform to platform and operator to operator.

Ø  Standardization of requirements between projects within a single fabrication yard has potential to streamline differences between adjacent projects that share workers, and improve effectiveness of training and assurance efforts.

5. Remove barriers to open sharing of lessons learned. There is no use sanitizing the message to the point of uselessness, and being vague dilutes the personal touch. As every soldier knows, war stories are more effective. The industry should be telling the stories, repeatedly, of the iconic incidents relevant to the industry. Likewise, sharing the success stories from jobs and projects successfully operated will enable learning opportunities from well-executed work. Story telling is a powerful way of educating and reinforcing attitudes.

6. Collaborate with regulatory authorities. Andrew Hopkins summarizes the need to get regulators onboard if continued and sustained improvement is to occur across the industry.

We recognize that certain legal systems can create an underlying adversarial relationship between industry and its regulators, but within this regulatory environment there is room to improve the collaboration and trust, which will lead to greater partnership

7. What do we do as individual companies? The real power to break down silos and barriers to get to zero ultimately resides with the operating companies because they drive contractor behavior in most of the world. This being said, some great risk-management and organizational-development improvements have been driven by individual drilling contractors and service providers.

This expectation [is] sometimes easier said than done when variables outside of the servicecontractor’s control are taken into consideration, such as numerous third parties and theirequipment, variances in processes across different companies, and the integrity of well-barriers owned and/or maintained by the operator or other contractors.

A collaborative environment and consistent safety culture is one in which all workers, regardless of the logo on their coveralls, look out for one another and confront each other as needed to address hazards. Ideally, a low-level laborer at any worksite can exercise “stop work” authority to a supervisor, regardlessof company, and be assured of support from the facility owner (operating company representative). Of course, the ideal state is not the real state at many oil and gas worksites.

a. Interdependent HSE culture. If a company has a mature interdependent HSE culture, its employees are more likely to recognize and act on hazardous conditions. The DuPont Bradley HSE culture model (Fig. 4) describes the journey to an HSE culture in three phases, moving from a dependent phase, through independence, to an interdependent culture.

In the dependent phase, HSE is mainly driven through use of control, discipline, rules, and regulations. As the culture matures, it moves through the independent phase, in which employees begin to take personal responsibility for HSE rather than simply relying on rules and regulations to create a safe work environment. The final—interdependent phase is characterized by a “peer’s keeper” approach that is adopted by all. In this phase, employees do not just look out for their own safety; everyone looks out for each other’s safety, and management works collaboratively with employees on HSE matters, feeling comfortable leading or allowing others to lead. People do this because they genuinely care about the safety and well-being of their colleagues. They do it because they want to, not because they have to.

                    Fig. 4—DuPont Bradley HSE culture modified to include zero.

b. Operational ownership of HSE. Interdependence is established by achieving operational ownership of HSE—that is, by employees assuming accountability for HSE performance and maintaining a safe work environment. Operational HSE ownership is characterized by employees looking out for each other, intervening in unsafe acts and conditions, and engaging with HSE to identify and implement risk-mitigating controls and processes. This leads to a collaborative engagement rather than HSE directing and acting as a police force in the organization. Operational ownership, however, must exist at every level of the organization to be successful.

c. Sustainable HSE leadership. While operational ownership of HSE leads to all employees assuming accountability for HSE performance, it is essential that senior leaders and managers be a continual driving force in embedding this concept throughout the organization. Senior leadership and managers have a direct effect on establishing the “culture” of the organization and on employee HSE behaviors in the workplace. The behavior of managers, through their influence on employees, can strongly influence the HSE performance and HSE culture of an organization. Only when senior leadership and managers adopt operational ownership of HSE will the rest of the organization follow.

The oil and gas industry has made great strides in the way we manage HSE. We must continue to evolve our culture so everyone across the industry is empowered and responsible to make the right decisions every time and is supported by the organization and systems to be error free. We must do this in the face of ever-changing market conditions that can form a barrier to HSE commitment and inhibit making the best decisions.

Changing how we manage HSE is the next frontier for our industry. How we go about that change will shape the industry and the world it serves far into the future (Hinton 2016).

Zero harm is the expectation and the industry has the bench strength, the fortitude, the commitment, and the resources to make it happen. Let’s get going