Managing Risk at Ground Level

Risk management continues to evolve to reflect changing challenges in the industry. Weatherford shares how adopting a behavior-based safety culture helped minimize risk and stop unsafe practices.

The term “risk management” is not new to the oil and gas industry, but its meaning continues to evolve to reflect changing challenges. For many, risk management might be synonymous with safety, or taking proper precautions to minimize the occurrence of an incident or unsafe condition. And while safety is a fundamental component of risk management, the concept also incorporates mitigating risks to service quality, productivity, and the environment.

Although the majority of companies in the oil and gas industry share a commitment to constantly improving their risk mitigation strategies, the execution is sometimes lacking. This is supported by statistics showing that the number of total recordable incidents in the United States upstream oil and gas industry has reached a plateau in recent years, despite the industry’s best efforts to lower them (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1—In 2011, the rate of job-related nonfatal injuries and illnesses among US oil and gas E&P workers was 1.9 per 100 full-time workers, compared with 2.2 for the US mining sector. The US offshore industry had a rate of 0.8 per 100 full-time workers. These levels have remained relatively flat over the past 5 years. Source: Workplace Injuries and Illnesses Safety Report, 2003–2011, American Petroleum Institute (2012). 

It is perhaps human nature to take a reactionary approach to changing risk management strategies only after one or more dangerous and environmentally harmful events have occurred. In the past few years, however, operators and service companies alike have been changing their mind-set on risk mitigation by adopting a forward-thinking approach to managing safety, quality, and environmental threats.

This requires a fundamental shift in a company’s risk culture. With regard to safety, for example, many companies historically have fostered a compliance-based safety culture—one that stresses safety for the sake of complying with regulatory guidelines or passing an audit. With this mind-set, the ultimate responsibility for safety might fall to one or more health, safety, and environment (HSE) officers, who perform the audits, fill out a checklist, and point out unsafe practices. Soon after the audit is over, however, the temptation to drift back to the old ways of performing work may be too strong to resist.

Changing Behaviors

A preferred approach, which is gaining traction in the industry, is to build a behavior-based safety culture, one in which each worker is committed to performing his or her work functions with the highest regard to safety, even when no one is looking over his or her shoulder. This behavior-based approach should be supported by top executives, but must start at the ground level, with the rig crews and workshop personnel who are most immediately affected. Achieving this culture begins with empowering employees through a comprehensive training program that gives them the tools and leadership skills to perform their tasks safely, and to intervene when they observe an unsafe act.

Weatherford recently launched a program called HSE Excellence, in which employees from all job functions are trained in the fundamentals of standard risk management tools, such as how to conduct a job hazard assessment to properly identify and address safety risks for an overall process, and a task risk assessment to identify risks in the individual tasks making up a job. Program candidates are selected based on their ability to provide direction and motivation in the field, their power to influence, leadership traits, and their willingness to advocate safe practices in their work and personal life. Supported by leadership, the candidate is trained to intervene and stop unsafe acts from happening, whether on a client’s job site or at his or her own facility.

Stopping Unsafe Practices

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By starting to implement a behavior-based safety culture at all levels of its organization, Weatherford has seen a significant drop in its total recordable incidents over the past 5 years. 

The industry also recognizes that minimizing risk means more than taking responsibility for one’s own actions, but also for the actions of one’s fellow workers. To that end, a behavior-based safety culture must develop competent workers who intervene when they see an unsafe act performed by someone else. At a minimum, workers must be trained to recognize an unsafe practice and fulfill their obligation to approach the personnel involved, in an instructive and non-threatening manner.

Depending on the severity of the unsafe practice, the observer stops the work and removes all affected personnel from a potentially risky situation. This may include a short break in activity to discuss the situation, jointly assessing the hazards of the task at hand and then developing a safer alternative process with proper mitigation strategies. In higher-risk situations in which serious injury or loss of life is possible, the worker has the authority to issue a stop work authority (SWA) card, which shuts down the operation until a more thorough risk assessment is conducted.

If a worker is in doubt as to the severity of a given unsafe practice, he or she must have support from his or her superiors to issue the SWA without fear of repercussion. Field personnel can then work confidently toward the best solution to minimize risk, which may range from a simple addition of more signage at the work site to a management of change process for long-term engineering solutions.

All parties must agree to the risk mitigation measure before it is implemented. The measure is then properly documented and the resulting outcome is recorded. The lessons learned should be carefully cataloged in a database such that they can be analyzed to gauge the effectiveness of the solution in improving job safety. A successful change that reduces risk should then be disseminated to the greater organization as a best practice, thereby fostering risk management improvement at all field locations.

Gaining Industry Acceptance

Operators are accepting, and endorsing, the use of SWA cards to remediate unsafe operations, even if the practice adds to their nonproductive time. During a recent operation on a well in the Asia Pacific region, the operator wanted to use Weatherford-supplied pressure control equipment to run a production packer. During the prejob safety meeting, the drilling company became uncomfortable with the plan because it would require using a rig air winch that was not certified to lift the pressure control equipment.

The equipment weighed 700 kg and it would have had to hang above field engineers and a drilling rig crew for more than 30 minutes during connection. Because of the safety concerns raised, field personnel received full support of Weatherford’s district manager to take steps to ensure the connection was made safely, including issuing a SWA card. Field personnel issued the card to the operator, which fully supported the decision. The equipment and associated personnel were demobilized from the rig site until an appropriate risk mitigation strategy could be found and implemented.

This example shows that operators support an approach to fundamentally changing risk management to achieve the desired result of efficient field operations that ensure everyone goes home safely. By shifting from a top-down, risk-management approach to one that empowers the individual, the industry is moving in the right direction to minimize risk and deliver safer, high-quality, and environmentally sustainable processes.

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Joe Sajjad is vice president of operational excellence and performance at Weatherford International, responsible for planning, implementing, and executing quality, reliability, safety, security, environmental, and training and development strategies. He joined Weatherford in January 2005 through Weatherford’s acquisition of Precision Drilling Corp.’s Energy Services Division and International Contract Drilling Division. Sajjad has more than 25 years of operations leadership experience at large global companies. He earned a BS degree from the University of Alberta.