Process Safety Onboarding for Leaders

Why? Leadership has always been critical to ensure safety.

Routine and non-routine activities demand safety protocols to reduce risk. Leaders are the ones that establish values, which inspire the workforce to prevent incident and potential serious incidents. They walk the talk, lead by example and promote focus on safeguards in place to prevent process safety events. Leaders must encourage the worker to always ensure safeguards are in place and functioning before they start work. Also, there is a common phrase that says “What interests my boss fascinates me” that means if leaders embrace process safety, talk about it, and ask questions, it could lead them into agents of change building culture and developing interest in the workforce. Quoting from Enhancing Process Safety culture through management review guide, there was a United States Navy known to say, “Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches.” He encouraged his managers to continually look at data to identify failures occurring in their organizations

Our Process Safety Journey, the Process Safety leadership training for Chevron Latin America Business Unit, was develop following chevron Corporate standards to ensure appropriate competency on leaders on process safety.

Along with Chevron Technical Center we identify and develop the best process safety journey training for LABU leaders, which includes CCPS matrix as per international standards.

Once the program structure was defined, the next steps was identified the measures put in place to prevent COVID virus spread among the target audience and the workforce in general, that why and for everyone convenience the training session was divide in 3 phases and those would be completed in remote environment: phase 1 about Leadership accountability and how it connects with process safety, Competency, workforce involvement, OE assurance and activities that we do to ensure our safeguard are in place an functioning and stakeholder engagement, how we integrate efforts along with Corporate affairs teams. Another key element for the first session is to understand general concept about risk but also to recognize critical risks we faced in Latin America and more important what we are doing to mitigate those. How risks are managed and how important is to maintain processes updated

The second phase is related to process safety critical elements and how they are integrated among each other, what elements engage in how we manage our risk.

The third and last phase is related to how to integrate lessons learned, learning from events to prevent new incidents.

In this presentation we would like to share each of the phases, our best practices and learning path.

Business Impact: Process Safety incidents are typically defined as “an event that is potentially catastrophic, that is, an event involving the release/loss of containment of hazardous materials that can result in large-scale health and environmental consequences.” A leader shall comprehend process Safety, not being an expert but understand the big picture and, more important, their role towards prevent fatalities and serious injuries; quoting from Enhancing Process Safety Culture through management review guide “foster a culture of risk awareness and vulnerability, to combat complacency and to sustainably assure process safety effectiveness.” By Increasing leaders’ knowledge in Process Safety, understanding and cascade down how important is to have critical safeguards in place and functioning, would lead for sure to increase efficiency and prevent fatalities.

Key take away: Even though leaders were from different functions and backgrounds, one element connect them, the fact they are all leaders, regardless of position in the organization, all positions and functions has a role to prevent fatalities and serious incidents, as stated in enhancing Process Safety Culture through management review guide “effective leadership is a critical success factor for Operational Excellent – leaders cultivate and drive our OE culture through their values, competencies and behaviors”. In addition, with the program developed we also provided them tools to be able to walk the talk and promote Process Safety in our operations while in the field.