Guest blog post by Roy Garcia - Director, Business Development @ VistaVu Solutions.
Recently I attended the Association for Energy Service Companies (AESC) General Session in Ft. Worth, TX – and the main topic of discussion centered on safety requirements in oilfield operations. This topic has been on everyone’s mind lately due to recent happenings in the Gulf, but its importance has always been recognized in the industry.
Clint Bowman, CSP & Corporate Safety and Health Manager at Noble Energy was one of the speakers and made some very interesting points on the topic.
According to Bowman safety doesn’t mean just outlining the guidelines and making sure that all employees go through the training, it has a lot more to do with creating a safety culture within your organization. Creating that culture means engaging your employees and welcoming their input on the way safety requirements are managed.
One thing that Bowman discussed which I found really interesting was his recommendation to set up safety motivators within your company. He said in his experience this is the best way to assist in changing the behaviour and overall culture of a company’s safety actions.
Bowman believes that once the culture of the organization begins to change, the next vital component is to create sustainable safety behaviour throughout the organization. Meaning – to incorporate a type of checks-and-balances that is easy for all to use and understand.
I think the reason that Bowman’s presentation stood out to me was because it directly aligns with our beliefs at VistaVu (to build the best team and take care of your people) – and it also applies to the goals we have for our clients.
I believe that the majority of all accidents that happen within the industry are preventable, but as Bowman points out, necessary prevention requires the correct culture within an organization. To us, it also means having the correct training and systems in place to make managing the safety requirements and regulations as easy as possible.
At VistaVu, we help our clients by delivering a system that can provide safety dashboards to management on how they are doing on reportable incidents, certificates, and safety training curriculum throughout the organization.
We also focus on preventative maintenance for machinery and vehicles by setting up maintenance schedules, which make it simple for our clients to keep their equipment operating at maximum capacity and minimizing risk to workers in the field.
The reporting capabilities we have in place within FieldVu allow the management team to easily provide visibility and communicate these findings back to the organization, thus helping increase employee motivation and create a sustainable safety culture.
