According to Bernie Wolford, president and CEO with Diamond Offshore, there are three credos that industry leaders must adhere to.
The first, he said, is recognizing the "moral and ethical imperative to safeguard the lives of the people we work with. It’s at the core of what we do, and it’s our highest obligation."
Secondly, Wolford said, health, safety, environment and training performance "is and necessarily always will be linked to human performance. They are inseparable."
Lastly, he said, "Actions speak louder than words, and consistent actions will be heard above all else. There is no replacement for being present and communicating your priorities and commitments on a regular basis."
Delivering a keynote address at the International Association of Drilling Contractors Health, Safety, Environment and Training Conference in Houston, Wolford recommended that conference delegates "seek tasks where controls are low" when addressing hazard identification.
"Send your workers to find tasks where there are no or very little controls around the work, and then ask them to come back and report on those tasks," he said. "From that, you get new feedback that you would not have gotten otherwise; you get additional engagement and you get a chance to build in barriers that save lives."
Wolford also warned of the dangers of normalizing risk. "I think we normalize risk all the time. We get to the point where we are blind to them," he said. "The amount of time we see people enter drop zones for non-critical tasks — we think is rare, but when we go back and watch the videos, it’s actually quite often. We normalize that — it’s just accepted."
Working alone is another example of risk normalization, he said. "When less than two people are working at a task, you don’t have the benefit of another set of eyes, or somebody potentially telling you to stop work," Wolford said, adding that in the worst cases, fatalities are often attributed to accepted risk or failure to recognize risk.
"There’s a lack of instilled discipline. I don’t mean lack of discipline in a worker, I mean lack of instilled discipline from the supervisors," he said.
Wolford cited air hoist implementation as indication of risk normalization. "We use air hoist not only to pick things up, but also to pull on things a lot harder than what they weigh so that they will come loose," he said. "We’ve accepted that risk in many cases just as a way of doing business. We’ve also normalized risk even though we know there are potential problems and, in truth, instead of stepping back, we tend to work harder when we have a problem."
Wolford also noted that workers have a propensity to accept risk especially after repeating that risk as part of a task or procedure.
"The first time, you may recognize it. The tenth time, you consider it accepted and you just go on. We have got a lot of work to do around accepting risk."
Wolford observed that most workers today — especially young people entering the workforce — want a purpose beyond a paycheck.
"They want meaning from their work, and that’s an element, I think, that we don’t fully appreciate," he said. "They want to be known for what makes them unique and valued as a member of the team. They want relationships not only with their crews but also with their supervisors and their leaders."
Citing a Gallup Poll, Wolford shared that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.
"That’s a pretty striking statistic. It also tells us where we probably need to focus if we want to improve engagement with our workforce. It affects retention, performance and attitude. If those things are important to us, then engagement is important to HSE. "Addressing engagement is not an HR thing, even though we always look to HR when we have an engagement challenge," Wolford concluded. "It’s a manager, leader and supervisor thing. We need to help give these people the tools they need to engage."
