According to Hugo Ashkar, global risk manager for BP, understanding the connection between culture and safety, environmental and financial performance has been "part of the BP construct for quite a while."
"The convergence point that we had ⦠was to our value system for BP's core values," Ashkar said. "It's like the legs of a stool."
Ashkar said he and his colleagues routinely focus on identifying and understanding what defines operational excellence.
"There isn't really a work standard for it, so each company has to find their own KPIs [key performance indicators], so to speak," Ashkar said on a panel at the Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas Summit held recently in Houston.
Ashkar explained five concepts make up BP's core value structure: safety, respect, excellence, courage and a "One Team" attitude.
"We found that if we could align [culture and safety, environmental and financial performance] to the values, then we could develop KPIs against those core values," he said.
Each one of BP's leaders is evaluated the same way, Ashkar explained.
"So, in short, the way to relate to these three values is by aligning the pertinent KPIs to the five core values we use," he said, "not only for performance, but also to evaluate our leaders' behavior."
Questions first, then answers
Yr Gunnarsdottir, operational excellence and continuous improvement process leadership for Royal Dutch Shell, said her company's approach to operational excellence comes from the top down.
"Where we did very well was putting it on the front line and asking them the questions," Gunnarsdottir said, adding she encourages workers to ask questions rather than try to come up with the answers.
"Think about it, but also come up with ideas," she said. "We're good at measuring the liability and praising operations but blaming maintenance when things go wrong, because we are focusing on our margins. We have to be able to talk about the consequences from both sides."
In general, the concept of operational excellence can be abstract, Gunnarsdottir observed. She recommended listeners ask operators not what they think about operational excellence, but rather what's important about where they are working and what that looks like in terms of safety behavior.
"That starts to make more sense," she said.
"If you want a more reliable organization, if you want operational excellence, it has to start at the bottom of the organizational chart and get the operator aligned with that culture," added Julie Thyne, panel moderator and North America continuous improvement leader at The Dow Chemical Company.
Noting the petrochemical industry has "a lot of inherent risks in many of our jobs," Thyne asked panelists how culture could be implemented to drive safety performance.
Royal Dutch Shell, Gunnarsdottir said, uses a "Safety Champions" program.
"What we really like about it is it takes you through the understanding what a safety champion is," she said. "It's not someone who walks around and says, 'You are doing something wrong and you should do it differently.' It's about [promoting] a culture of safety and allowing for peer-topeer intervention."
The training includes coaching the front line as well as contractors, she said, addressing topics like intervention and having conversations that "make sense."
"It's about helping them realize where potential accidents can happen and asking them what they think you can do about it," she said. "You have the whole conversation on a different level where the people who are in the front line with the experience of seeing it themselves are coming up with actions to mitigate together without having the feeling of punishing people."
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