The challenge Marathon Petroleum Corp. put to its health, environment, safety and sustainability (HESS) crew was direct: Develop a contractor-led safety program that revitalized the engagement of the contractor workforce.
So, under the leadership of Michael Babin, HESS professional for Marathon, one of the first processes addressed was how performance audits were conducted.
"No one on our site is allowed to audit themselves," Babin said in a presentation at the 32nd Annual Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Seminar held recently in Galveston, Texas.
"Now, 'Contractor A' has to audit 'Contractor B,'" Babin said. "When we started doing that, we start getting job safety analysis (JSA) scores that were true -- 45, 50, 55."
This audit switch was introduced two years ago, Babin said.
"Now we're getting something we can work with," he added.
Since the JSA training was implemented with the company's contractors "and we started really pushing it," Babin said, "there's not a JSA on our site that gets below 85."
If a JSA score falls below 80, HESS is notified at once.
"I get an email, and whoever the contractor representative is for our site gets an email, and they go out and look at that JSA immediately," he said.
"What we found was that if our contractors ⦠go below 75 percent as a site, we start having more incidents. There was a direct correlation between our incident rates and our JSA scores," Babin said. "They were at 75, so we made a goal of 80. They have to be above 80 or we're going to know about it within a minute and a half or two minutes of that being done."
Surveys utilizing existing technology
Real-time electronic surveys are quick and easy to create, Babin said, because the end user does not need a personal account. All that is needed is a cell phone.
"We had a system that had all the bells and whistles, but our corporate division had a system in place that basically sent out surveys," he said. "So we took that and we said, 'Couldn't we use that to make some audits out of it? It's cheap -- we already paid for it.'"
The system is easy to use and performs the necessary functions for the surveys.
"You get real-time feedback, and I don't have to manage 500 different user names and access codes for all of our contractors," Babin said. "I don't need them to have any."
This system, Babin said, gives the user access to multiple tools, such as different logs.
"They're very easy to put together and they're very easy to share, so we made a general audit where they'd go out and say, 'Here's what we're finding: There's a head protection issue or a fall protection issue.' But that wasn't enough," Babin said. "You could hide behind a beam and do that."
As a result, employees are required to be more specific about those issues.
"'Hey, I see you have a fall protection issue. Why did you do that?'" Babin said, offering an example in which an employee was noted to have taken a wrong point.
"We added the question of 'Why?' and we averaged seven or eight reasons. 'Maybe I wasn't trained,' or 'Maybe I wasn't wearing the right fall protection equipment,'" Babin said. "So we could start tracking and training those whys."
Not only was the tracking and additional training helpful, Babin said, but it also got employees and safety professionals to respond to issues more like proactive observers rather than "safety cops."
"Asking people, 'Why did you do this wrong?' kind of ruins our 'family atmosphere,'" Babin said. "Don't go out there and run people off and tell them they're wrong. That's not what it's about. You're a resource to help them fix it and make it right."
