Building a World-Class Safety Culture

How do you bring together 12,000 professionals from around the globe with three distinct cultures without losing focus on safety?

2017 was a historic year for field services at GE Power Services when we created a business solely focused on World-Class Execution for our customers. In August of last year, FieldCore, a GE company, was born. FieldCore brings together the history, legacy, technical expertise and people of the Power Services field services team and Granite Services into one organization dedicated to making GE's field services capabilities more competitive and consistent across the globe.

More than 90 percent of our employees work at our customers' sites across all power generation types ranging from heavy-duty gas turbines, renewables, the Oil & Gas sector and more. The safety of our employees is ALWAYS our number one priority. We just cannot allow anything else to take over and prevent us from achieving the goal of everyone going home safely at the end of each day.

As CEO I feel this responsibility very personally every day. Having started my career in this industry as a field service engineer, I fully understand the daily pressures that can affect making the right choices around safety. 

From a cultural perspective, we are rapidly bringing together people around the world with the aim of building one World-Class execution team. Although we have drawn from the GE family, there are differing experiences of how safety programs were executed. We are integrating the safety cultures of Alstom, GE Power Services and Granite Services so that, from Japan to Argentina, our customers can expect consistent service, irrespective of service line.

I feel we have a real opportunity with FieldCore to set the tone and drive safety performance to new levels and be truly World-Class. We are striving for a single standard of global certification of safety (EHS) management under OHSAS 18001. We are building a more user-friendly EHS management system using best practices from across the legacy businesses.

While I can look at significantly reduced injury rates and take some comfort from that, I can never get away from the fact that people do get injured at work. I firmly believe every safety incident is preventable. Injury rates on their own, do not tell the full picture. A focus on these can mask the slowly-developing harm that may be caused from workplace risks, and so we must be vigilant in our focus on environment and health also.

With operations in 63 countries, culture can quickly become a complex topic, and I like to keep things simple. For me, culture is simply 'the way we work.' I am always looking for indicators that demonstrate the way we are working will help us reach World-Class EHS standards. 

Stop work authority is one indicator, where every one of our employees, regardless of level in the organization, has the confidence to stop activities and take stock of a situation. In FieldCore we have some excellent examples of this. I am pleased with our 2017 efforts: reporting over 8,000 stop work situations where we recognized early the potential to cause harm and took decisive action. This was a 66 percent increase from comparative 2016 data. In addition, our employees submitted more than 43,000 concern reports, which addressed unsafe actions or situations, as well as the all-important safe working recognition reports where exemplary safe working practices and behaviors were recognized. These leading indicators tell the team and me that we are driving the culture we seek. That said, safety is a never-ending journey and we can never become complacent.

 FieldCore is about making GE's field services capabilities more competitive and consistent. Safety is a big part of that. As a company, we are building a culture where every employee is focused on safety as a core value. It's our business differentiator in the marketplace, but most importantly, it's the right thing to do for our employees and customers.