CURTIS SHAKOTKO, COO, OneSource EHS
Facilities put a lot of effort into ensuring people get home to their families safely every day. This is especially true when preparing to enter a turnaround event. With the many planning details going into these outages, it is easy to believe that everything possible is already being done in regard to safety. However, one area that can easily be overlooked is effectively integrating contracting companies and temporary workers coming on-site into your facility's safety culture. By expanding the safety culture beyond your core team, you'll provide a foundation for each person to make better safety decisions. Promoting safety values may be the missing piece to significantly improving turnaround safety performance.
Evaluating the safety culture: A strong safety culture places high value on safe work practices, integrating safety into daily activities and actively promoting it at home and work. Measuring the facility's attitude toward safety is a critical first step in understanding your culture.
Turnarounds are planned months in advance of the actual event. During the time between them, the facility runs on a routine. This is an ideal time to understand employee safety perceptions. By quantifying the facility's safety culture, you'll gain an understanding of both the positive attitudes and systemic safety issues. This will help the management team understand safety perceptions, beliefs and values that are impacting daily decisions. Quantifying your facility's safety culture will provide you with a tangible means to systematically improve the culture and identify strengths that should be carried forward to all turnaround employees.
Integrating the safety culture into the turnaround: Once employee safety beliefs are understood and the culture revealed, actions can be taken to reinforce positive attitudes and correct systemic behaviors that expose the company to unnecessary risk. Upon receipt of the quantified results of a safety culture assessment, immediate actions can be taken in conjunction with the turnaround planning. Preparing the facility's team will improve the underlying basis for decisions during the shutdown and set a strong example for all of the temporary workers. Techniques such as felt leadership, focused training and awareness campaigns can be used to reinforce the facility's safety values in preparation for the additional workers' arrival.
Turnarounds are often described as controlled chaos, so the more eyes spotting highrisk activities, the better. During the shutdown, abbreviated safety culture assessments or proactive observations can be used to formally identify at-risk behaviors and attitudes before they manifest into an unsafe act or a potential injury. These surveys, questionnaires or observation forms can be completed, submitted and analyzed routinely. The results should be communicated to all on-site staff frequently. This proactive approach will build the safety culture and address real-time issues.
Using a safety culture to your advantage: Using information from a safety culture assessment before a turnaround, incorporating safety observations and implementing cultural questionnaires into the shutdown are very powerful tools to proactively manage performance.
Promoting safety values may be the missing piece to significantly improving turnaround safety performance.
To fully harness the advantage of a strong safety culture during turnarounds, consider adding safety culture values and real-time findings into daily toolbox talks, meetings and field interactions. The intent is to constantly support the facility safety culture while informing personnel of relevant safety issues. Once safety values have been fully communicated, engage people and provide them with the authority to temporarily stop work. The personal responsibility to ensure questions are answered, reevaluate potentially dangerous tasks and enhance communication will substantially mature the safety program and arm each person with information and empowerment to talk about safety concerns. Your facility will find a new level of performance during the turnaround.
For more information, visit www. OneSourceEHS.com or call (225) 644-5332.
