I have nothing against anybody in the EHS department, many of their employees do a great job. The issue has always been the safety culture as recently documented by the chemical safety board. Some of this has been cleaned up and great progress has been made.
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Yup. That's the long way of saying 'it's broke.' Along with a lot of other stuff. And a lot of the problem management is still in place. It won't be fixed any time soon. Just hope nobody else dies before it's fixed.
From public enquiries it has become evident that a broken Safety Culture is responsible for many of the major Process Safety disasters that have taken place around the world over the past 20 years or so.[18] Typical features related to these disasters are where there had been a culture of:
‘Profit before safety’, where productivity always came before safety, as safety was viewed as a cost, not an investment.- YES
‘Fear’, so that problems remained hidden as they are driven underground by those trying to avoid sanctions or reprimands. YES
‘Ineffective leadership’, where blinkered leadership and the prevailing corporate culture prevented the recognition of risks and opportunities leading to wrong safety decisions being made at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. YES
‘Non-compliance’ to standards, rules and procedures by managers and the workforce. YES
‘Miscommunication’, where critical safety information had not been relayed to decision-makers and/ or the message had been diluted. YES
‘Competency failures’, where there were false expectations that direct hires and contractors were highly trained and competent. YES
Ignoring ‘lessons learned’, where safety critical information was not extracted, shared or enforced.
If one of these features of a broken safety culture is present in a company, it signals there are opportunities for change. If three or more, they should be addressed with the utmost urgency, as the potential for an incident increases exponentially with the number of broken safety culture features the company has.
Is ST out? If so, who's in charge of safety now?
I agree she was great at dismantling, but did little to build a true EHS team. Potentially this was due to her being too focused on how to circumvent environmental regs, than learning about safety and health.
The fact that you're depending on a safety director to improve your culture means you've already failed. When the VPs and managers in the field embrace it and own it, the culture will change. As long as they have an excuse and a scapegoat, the culture will stay the same. Change is hard and most people are naturally resistant to change. After all of the reorgs, Williams should be used to change. Williams has to get used to change that get undone if the results aren't perfect in 6 months. Culture change is a 5-10 year process and you have to stick with it the entire time. I'm not a S.T. fan either and she does a lot to impede the improvement culture and process. But if the organization was truly interested in change - and not just waiting for someone to do it for them - they'd have already gone around her and done it anyways. Just my .02
Who's the new Safety leader?
That reply nailed it! S.T. is in over her head on top of that her people skills are terrible and people block her out.
Safety record very disappointing. Excuses that ST had no background in it misses the mark. If she's some leader/manager, she should have been able to work this out. Instead, she oversaw a dismantling. Reducing vehicle incidents isn't enough. Creating new busywork (Gensuite) a wate of time and money. Alan found a safety leader from among the ranks. Maybe he can pull it together
Need to make sure that they have enough personnel in all parts of their organizations to work strictly on safety, boots on ground, training, leaders , rtc If done correctly the reorganization can be used an great opportunity to beef up their safety resources. The penny wise pound foolish way hasn't work well, and needs to change, as well as culture.
Great safety record?? Idk where that's at. I agree that a turn should be on the horizon, but in the past 14 months williams has had 5 fatalities on its watch. That's not so good. There are many other industry peers that produce just as much or more and have some pretty dangerous processes (if something were to go wrong) and haven't had any fatalities. There is much more work to do from what it looks like.
You have a lot of non-safety experience I upper management; this might work if you had a good culture, but when you're building culture, not so much
It is not that Williams has a bad safety record, the point is it can be improved. This consolidation with okc could be an opportunity to improve safety. Need strong leadership at the top and there are signs that the corner is being turned. Some operations are great and others have been improved, more work is needed in the number of areas as well.