The Supervisors Next Big Challenge: How to Ensure Operational Discipline on the Work Fronts

How to Ensure Operational Discipline on the Work Fronts

There is a problem that the petrochemical and oil and gas industries have not solved effectively: how to transform work fronts in environments based on operational discipline.

All the commitment and effort that an organization mobilizes in its risk management, finally, is updated in what happens between supervisors and operators on the work fronts. That is why it is so necessary to work on the alignment of the workforce of operating companies and contractors.

In the last decade, Senior Management became more aware of its role: defining what were tolerable risks and assuring resources. Process Safety, Integrity and Environment ceased to be discursive themes, to effectively have a genuine place at the small table where strategic decisions are made. The biggest challenge has been getting it to operate according to those definitions.

Supervision is carried out on the work front, the true executive arm of the organizations in the field. And for this organizational segment to ensure a disciplined operation, they need to be able to manage the culture.

A common mistake in the risk management approach has been to think of the lack of operational discipline of supervision as a problem of isolated individuals, and not of the context in which these people work, that is, of the context that the activities provide. organizations, from the context produced by culture.

When analyzing the supervision segment, one should not think of undisciplined people, but cultures that tolerate them, or that reinforce risky behaviors and shortcuts to the established norm. If supervision does not ensure operational discipline on the work fronts, it is because the organization does not provide the conditions for this to occur. People are the reflection of the culture in which they operate. Individuals do not impose a personal style of managing risks in isolation, but adapt to group agreements, displaying safe or unsafe behaviors depending on what is collectively tolerated. Field supervisors only take risks that the culture allows them to take.

The change of mindset in the supervision segment should not be built on the basis of shortcuts or “crash plans”, but rather in avoiding in a progressive and lasting way the repetition of incidents, through a transformative process: generating a culture of discipline, learning and mutual trust in the work fronts, based on group agreements between operators and contractor companies, managed by a trained supervision to make decisions based on risks, combat the normalization of deviance and keep in mind the sense of vulnerability.

The key is to generate the conditions for effective learning. In addressing group problems, and not individual ones. The challenge is to create the conditions so that operational discipline is not a declaration of principles but a reality in the field. For this they do not need new knowledge, but to deepen what they already know, in the right context.

The pandemic, paradoxically, provided an opportunity to improve the quality of supervision development, personalizing it. Although online self-training has been around for a long time, it is not the most appropriate tool to generate changes in operations. For that, culture needs to intervene.

The next decade seems to keep a central challenge: transforming supervisory teams into custodians of culture and guarantors of risk management, through work fronts based on operational discipline.