Learning Event Bulletins (LEBs) are the most widely used of Safer Together’s wide range of safety improvement initiatives. Here’s the story of how one company uses LEBs to strengthen engagement with the frontline workforce.
A full recording of the Case Study presentation.
Challenge
Information overload is a common problem for frontline workers in major hazard industries – so how can you get important messages to cut through? Learning Event Bulletins are a key safety communication tool, but it’s essential they are rolled out in a way that ensures the information people at the frontline receive is relevant, timely and engaging.
Established in 2018, JPS Management & Execution (JPS) is a young organisation that specialises in integrating highly experienced, specialist personnel and teams into the operations workforce of major hazardous oil & gas facilities, both onshore and offshore, where they support the delivery of projects, shutdowns, campaigns and the delivery of operations.
In the early days, JPS could lean heavily on the extensive experience of its small team of people to maintain a safe workplace. But as the company grows and new, less experienced people are recruited into the team, reliance on this approach is unsustainable. The need for more systematic and robust controls for managing safety becomes increasingly apparent.
As a small contractor with their people dispersed across multiple sites around Australia and embedded into client teams on the client’s facilities, JPS doesn’t always have direct control of the safety performance and standards that their team members are exposed to. This vulnerability left the JPS leaders looking for effective ways to engage their workforce about safety and ultimately keep them safe at work.
Solution
JPS aims to be a “learning organisation” that adopts good initiatives developed by others in the industry, and that also brings good ideas to the rest of industry.
Safety culture is hugely important to JPS and to the client companies they work for. The JPS management team recognised that Learning Event Bulletins provide a great opportunity for them to:
- reinforce their company’s safety values.
- engage with their team on issues that are relevant to them.
- share learnings from other companies in the oil & gas industry, and
- maximise use of the limited resources that they have as a small company.
Result
The management team at JPS take the time to become very familiar with the work scopes their teams are engaged to deliver and the potential risks they could be exposed to. They get out of the office, put on their fire-resistant clothing and go out to the site to engage their people directly in their day-to-day work environment.
As a management team they commit to reviewing all the Learning Event Bulletins that Safer Together issues, evaluating each one against the work that their people are currently doing, and then carefully selecting the relevant ones to share with their teams. What they don’t do is simply forward all the Learning Event Bulletins they receive as an attachment to an email, and then hope for the best!
The approach taken by JPS is to try to stimulate good conversations among their frontline workforce, and they do this by using leading questions. The types of questions they ask their people directly include:
- “We’ve been sent this Learning Event Bulletin, and we want to know could this happen on the site that you’re working on at the moment?”
- “What barriers are in place to prevent this from happening at the site where you’re working right now?”
- “How do you know that those barriers are in place?” and
- “Is there anything you could be doing to further reduce the risk of this happening on your site?”
Importantly, the JPS management team also ask their teams for feedback. They want to know if the sharing of a particular Learning Event Bulletin is useful to their people - if it is, why? and if it’s not, why not? This helps the organisation to learn and to find out from “the people on the tools” if there’s something else management should be focusing on so that everyone in the company can learn together.
"It sticks with you, I found myself really focusing on the specifics of this incident and looking at the way the equipment was being installed in this shutdown, and we also picked up additional leaks along the way which was a great outcome" (LNG Operations Specialist)
"Being informed of lessons learned throughout the industry on other sites, is an invaluable tool when preparing / reviewing procedures and work instructions. To have the information of past incidents / accidents when trying to break down task steps adds insight into hazards that may arise and mitigations that may be potentially beneficial." (LNG Operation Specialist)
"Since the team at JPS has been a part of the Safer Together community, they do a great job of keeping all of us in the loop with the significant safety events that occur in our industry across Australia. I personally find these timely reminders so beneficial, if there is a safer way to do something, I definitely want to learn about it. Everyone has their own reason for why they go to work every day and what is most important to them. For me, it's going home to my family at the end of each swing and creating memories. Considering the safest approach to any task, especially in an industry as volatile as ours, really is the most important part of our job no matter what." (LNG Operations Specialist).
Lessons Learnt
Embrace Your Curiosity – create a learning environment and especially support those that have the courage to declare “I don’t know”. The best conversations are where the “lightbulb moment” happens and you can see that your people have learnt something.
Less Is More - If team members are swamped by too many safety-related messages, the reality is that they are unlikely to absorb them all. And when that happens, you might lose control over which messages have the real impact.
Make It Relevant - For example, offshore workers are more likely to relate to a lifeboat safety learning event than they would to a land transport learning event.
It’s The Conversation That Counts - LEBs are great tools that stimulate thinking. Use them as an innovative way to engage your team and share experiences collectively.