Transforming the mega-project safety culture at a leading petrochemicals company
A positive culture enabled the fastest start up in the company’s history
#1
Award winning project
Challenge
As part of a joint venture, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP (CPChem) was constructing the largest, most energy efficient ethane cracker in the world on the US Gulf Coast. The project had experienced a very high rise in recordable incidents and CPChem had experienced its first ever fatality, a tragedy that hit the organization hard. This galvanized the site to change its approach and create a shift in the safety culture.
JMJ was already working with the project partnership in two areas, High Performance Team Building and Incident and Injury Free™ (IIF™). CPChem’s leadership could see that follow up was needed on Train the Trainer and orientation sessions. Together with JGC, its joint venture partner, CPChems asked us to help transform the cracker project into a fully embedded IIF safety culture.
Solution
Led by construction management and reinforced by first- and second-line supervisors in the field, the IIF approach helped create a positive culture by:
- Helping leadership understand how to develop relationships to secure worker engagement and accountability
- Ensuring that everyone ‘walked the walk’ and led by example
- Demonstrating visible leadership
- Creating a culture of respect and open communication
- Harnessing the power of the workforce to embrace the safety message
JMJ’s approach provided daily principles built on a proven leadership approach to create a common language and get everybody working in the same direction.
Client Goals
- Address the project’s very serious safety problem
- Align the project around a common language and direction
- Hold people at the higher levels accountable for making safety a priority
- Help first line supervisors create a work environment that would lead to safe, productive work in the field
While it is difficult to measure every area of success, I think the impact JMJ helped create on a site with around 5,000 project workers plus many additional contractors is pretty remarkable.
JMJ’s role made us more safety conscious. It’s just so effective in interacting with workers and building relationships and trust and that certainly helped us get a sense of where the culture was. We absolutely stuck to walking the talk and were committed to the things that helped us succeed. We simply recognized that doing anything else, other than a consistent approach, would create backsliding or a return to chaos.
Results
From start up, the project experienced zero recordable incidents or process incidents. Leadership saw a distinct change in how workers talked and felt about the project. This became evident when the project was 97% complete and hurricane Harvey forced work to stop for 17 days. Managers were concerned workers wouldn’t return and were delighted when 99% came back. They attributed this loyalty to the improved culture. The project achieved full rate certification faster than any new cracker in the technical
contractor’s history.
Incident free
No recordable incidents or process incidents
Rapid culture change
Measurable improvements within six months
Award winning
Project won an award for ‘the most improved safety record’