HSE Data Analysis for Sustainable Workforce

The maritime industry is picking up very slowly but is bound to get to the Up-cycle in another 2-3 years. As the Meriting trade to GDP ratio is falling slowly, the industry experts believe that the past profit levels might never be achieved again. With marginal changes in Dry and bulk along with stagnant Container and an ever so volatile Crude, the revenue is getting rarer.

With ever so slowly increasing Charter rates, ship operators are finally looking outside their own company statistics and trying to compare their performance with other similar operators, mainly to find out if they are Over doing with the expenses with regards to maintaining their KPIs.

As is the case with any organisation, shipping companies are also very secretive with their performance data. If it was not for ISM code, we would have never been able to look at a company’s KPIs with regards to LTIF (Lost time Injury Frequency) and TRIF (Total Recordable Injury Frequency). Under ISM the companies must publish their “Sustainability Report” where such data can be located for reference.

However it might be important to point out that this data is also exposed to company prejudice and might be cured to some extent for obvious reasons. The competition is excessive these days and not having a profitable image can cost you a contract or might end up in detailed Charter’s or Third-Party inspection unfairness, which I am sure no one wants.

There are forums like HSE UK where the data relating to injuries, accidents, breakdowns and health of employee is maintained and analysed. Based on the analysis the government forms legislations to improve the workforce sustainability.

A similar approach can be very useful with most shipping companies. The resources required for such an analysis are already available in most of the organisations. The missing piece is the Will to do it. This “Will” is directly related to the business growth and raw revenue generation. As the “Will” reduces so reduces the moral or workforce. This is the very reason why we have seen a rise in incidents caused by Human factor in the last 3 years. The forums like IMCA also publish their annual analysis on reported incidents and is available for download on their website.

The responsibility comes to the HSEQ team of any company in developing convincing arguments for resource allocation in order to improve workforce sustainability. There are a few ways this can be partially achieved.

1.      Sharing of incidents and Near-miss with IMCA, UK HSE or other similar forums would enable them in generating a proper representative data, analysis of which can really add value while developing company policies.

2.      Sharing the IMCA or similar forum reports in your fleet will encourage the organisation in identifying the blind sectors or their operations. Also it has been observed that the onboard crew is motivated in reporting unsafe conditions after reading shared reports.

3.      Increase the transparency in incident, breakdown and injury reports across the verticals in an organisation can give a proper insight on the underlying causes or better termed as Root Cause. This can enable bulls eye approach in allocating resources and getting the maximum impact.

4.      Making the industry or competitor’s KPI comparison part of meetings would reduce the  self-serving bias.

There are much smarter ideas in the industry just waiting to be explored and implemented. I am sure as the industry evolves so will the attitude towards Sustainability of both organisation and the workforce.