Revitalizing a safety culture throughout operations in a complex, multicultural environment
How the world’s largest LNG company created a culture of care for its people and facilities
38%
improvement in lost time injury frequency
Challenge
JMJ’s partnership with the world’s largest LNG producer began in 2002 when we were engaged to help develop an Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™) safety approach across the organization’s assets. In subsequent years, our client continually improved its safety processes and programs. However, as the number of new projects increased sharply, reaching over 3,000 employees and approximately 2,000 contractors, many of whom didn’t share a common language or culture, maintaining a cohesive safety culture proved to be a challenge. In addition, a new leadership team was installed, replacing the stakeholders who had originally championed the Incident and Injury Free (IIF) culture. Over time, the emphasis on IIF became diluted until it was no longer tightly woven throughout each asset, and practices were not consistently applied. In 2012, the tragic loss of seven lives caused shockwaves across the entire business, prompting a renewed determination to ensure the safety of all the company’s people and assets.
To revitalize the Incident and Injury-Free culture and bring safety back to the forefront, the LNG company once again engaged with JMJ, this time to conduct an IIF in Action™ pilot program in two of its assets. The intention was to capture best practices which could be rolled out across the organization. The pilot program interacted with more than 370 employees and long-term contractors. It proved so successful that leadership decided to proceed with plans to deploy IIF in Action across all assets.
Solution
JMJ’s main objective was to engage employees and contractors at all levels to improve communication, teamwork and promote safety excellence. To achieve this, IIF coaches from all assets were trained to educate and enroll people into supporting and practicing the safety culture in their daily work. The coaches did this by being visible role models, proactively delivering the IIF message and encouraging wide use of IIF in Action practices and the principle of “Understand – Ask – Speak Up”. Coaches worked in partnership with the asset management team to provide visible, consistent safety leadership in the field and ensure the IIF safety culture sustained and flourished. The asset managers were equipped to engage teams and contractor partners, and everyone was enrolled to take personal responsibility for keeping their work environment safe. Some outcomes of this included:
- Frontline workers joined forces with technical authorities to create efficient and user-friendly procedures
- New dialogue about safety gave asset managers critical feedback, leading to appropriate action
- Safety went beyond a mere ‘check-the-box’ activity
- Individual workers were encouraged to express concerns and stop any activity they deemed unsafe
Client Goals
The client’s goals in revitalizing its commitment to an IIF safety culture were to:
- Deliver a safe and highly reliable organization
- Improve the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR)
- Improve safety performance, where everyone goes home safely, every day
- Build a deep commitment to safety across the organization
- Improve process safety leadership throughout all assets
- Encourage contractors to engage in the program and visibly commit to safety
- Improve communication between all assets and their contractors
- Help every team member understand they are accountable for safety
- Build a stronger ‘one team’ mindset between contractors, operations, and maintenance
Create ownership as a key element in achieving safety,
health, environment, and quality
Reduced recordable injuries in the last turnaround and people starting to speak up—these are the two clear results [of IIF in Action™] I can see. Before, interaction was one way only. Now it is about asking them first, rather than just telling them. Speaking up is important and has been increased. IIF is the best working thing on this project… and we can do better…. and I can do better.
We want to show the world we can achieve an Incident and Injury-Free workplace and we can build this to show we are number one in the world. The ultimate goal is to be the benchmark for safety within the oil and gas industry.
Results
By building a high-performance team across all assets and removing communication barriers between contractors, managers and staff, the LNG company has already seen world-class safety results, and is continuing to close in on its aggressive safety targets.
Lowest ever TRIR
32% improvement gave the LNG company its lowest ever Total Recordable Incident Rate
Process safety improvement
Our client experienced zero tier-one process safety events
Reliability target met
Moving from 96.6 to 98.2 in three years (measured by amount of time a LNG plant is running at capacity)
Shutdowns completed safely
Two shutdowns completed ahead of schedule and without incident