Abstract
The Step Change in Safety Human Factors Workgroup strive to improve the basic knowledge and understanding of human factors to ensure related risks are properly managed and controlled. The objective of this paper is to highlight the ability to do this proactively through engagement with the workforce through lunch and learns, webinars, cross-industry sharing and self-assessment tools. Step Change in Safety have developed an online self-assessment tool to help organisations in the oil and gas industry gauge how effective they are at addressing human factors issues. This tool has enabled companies to identify areas of strengths to expand upon, and points of weakness to develop further, to overall enhance their safety performance. Human Factors in the oil and gas industry continues to hold an element of mystery to most of the offshore workforce who see it as an emotional exercise to discuss how they feel rather than physical barriers which could save their lives if considered properly. The Step Change tool dives into this unknown area to gain insight at an industry level and identifies areas to focus the efforts of the data-driven Human Factors Workgroup. Essentially, this work is a proactive way to address potentially catastrophic ‘unknown unknowns’ (as per Donald Rumsfield) and make human factors accessible to all. The online tool has been used more than 5,000 times by workers on and offshore and this paper will explore the three most popular themes it has identified; Fatigue, Managing Human Failures and Training and Competence. This paper will examine the results and showcase examples where companies have made a proactive change as a result of intelligence gained from this tool, as a strong example of how to be proactive in a reactive world. Furthermore, this paper will put the ‘human’ into human factors in the oil and gas environment and discuss proactivity in a climate where cost efficiency often means that reaction is the first line of defence.
