Very Hard HSE Lessons Learned: Choose Your Safety Awards Wisely

To the best of my knowledge, the oil industry has never gone through a HAZID exercise related to the selection and distribution of a corporate safety award. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with both the choice and distribution of these awards, right? Well, a lot can go wrong - seriously wrong beyond comprehension - and this article describes the consequences that can arise when an organization operates without a functioning safety culture.

And yes, this really did happen.

On the initial day of my first international employment contract, I entered a high rise office building full of people who were gushing with pride and expectation. In the next two weeks, the SPE would bestow upon my new employer its first 1,000,000 injury free man hours award. This was set to be a major accomplishment for this organization as it had been striving to break out of the mid-tier E&P ranks and join the upstream big boys club. This award would accord a good deal of well deserved positive international recognition and assist with building a presence outside its home country. The CEO was scheduled to host a big celebration the following week when that magic millionth injury free man hour was reached. We were assured each day that collective morale was at an all-time high. Go Team!

To make the occasion extra-special, on that magic millionth hour every employee in the company was to receive a special, one of a kind safety award to commemorate the hard won occasion. Like a talisman bequeathed in some ancient right of passage ritual. But it was here where my employer made its fateful decision and set the first domino in motion when it assigned the selection of this award to an office bound employee with zero practical oilfield experience. And what did this person who had never donned a hard hat decide to issue as the extra-special safety award - pocket knives. But not just any ol' pocket knives, these had "1,000,000 Man Hours" engraved into the handles like a proxy for driving this accomplishment into the collective corporate ethos. This person didn't get a Master's Degree in Organizational Psychology and write a thesis on Carl Jung for nothing. Super cool idea, yeah?

To ensure that these pocket knives were issued to field personnel on that exact magic millionth moment, they were sent out to the remote field offices about two weeks in advance of the big day. That meant that these super cool pocket knives sat inside boxes at the front of each foreman's cluttered desk a good full week before being issued. And with oilfield people being naturally curious and me having no good male equivalent of Pandora to use as a description, what pumper could resist looking inside those boxes once the foreman left his office to go make a fresh pot of coffee? During the next few days the surprise was eventually discovered by the field personnel - these really were super cool pocket knives that the pumpers couldn't wait an extra three days to receive, and since there is no such thing as a secret in the oilfield, once a few pumpers knew about the pocket knives, by lunch time they all knew. Many a foreman had no choice now but issue these pocket knives in advance of the big day, lest they be subject to endless entreaties and complaints. Squeaky wheels get the grease again.

At this point Darwinian Selection really kicked in as these pocket knives were not only super cool, but they were also super useful for performing a diverse range of tasks when one found themselves without the proper tools readily available. And sure enough, the next day - two days before the millionth injury free man hour was to be reached - one of these pocket knife early recipients stabbed himself clear through his hand with his - (drum roll here) - with his safety award (crash symbol sound).

Let that sink in for a minute.

It was a serious wound and the base camp medical facility couldn't stem the bleeding so the injured party had to be airlifted several hundred miles to the nearest hospital for treatment. So with less than a combined 20,000 injury free man hours to go, the unthinkable happened - the company logged a recordable LTI right at the finish line, and the next day some poor soul had to call the SPE and inform it that the company was no longer in line to receive its big safety award. It is unknown what ever happened to all those pocket knives, but all the balloons and festoons and bunting that had adorned the office building's foyer in anticipation of the big day came down immediately.

I was once told that the bigger the failure, the bigger the lesson. But a corollary to this statement could be that big failures are often derived from small oversights. From excessively cold O-rings to neglecting to tag out Condensate Pump A, it is the little things that set the dominoes falling and lead to the colossal failures at the end of a series of unfortunate and unforeseeable events. This time was lucky in a sense - the only things lost were an award and a few pints of blood. But it is a valuable lesson on how HSE should permeate decisions and, when there is potential for those things to arise that cannot ever possibly be conceived, that a safety culture has been built and kicks in that prevents such a series of unfortunate events from ever beginning in the first place. Thus the safety culture becomes the fail-safe in an ever expanding web of possibilities that all lead to the same outcome - catastrophic failure. In this case, the company had promoted safety awareness and regularly handed out safety swag, but lacked an internalized safety culture.

So the next time some one asks you, "Why do we need a safety culture?", have them read this article.