Safety in numbers

With Justin Smith of the British Safety Council

Skills shortages are affecting every area of the oil and gas industry – but when it comes to health and safety departments they could be affecting lives. O&G asks Justin Smith, Business Manager of the British Safety Council what his organisation is doing to boost the recruitment of health, safety and environment (HSE) officers in the Gulf region.

HSE: more grit than glamour

“HSE is the main priority when you’re winning contracts or you’re looking to expand projects or work with international partners.”
-Justin Smith, Business Manager, British Safety Council

O&G. Is there a serious shortage of qualified HSE officers among oil and gas companies in the Middle East?
Justin Smith. Gulf based companies have always operated under complex and challenging conditions. HSE is a very demanding role and not only within the Gulf countries but also anywhere around the world good HSE people are still a scare resource. In the Gulf this is coupled with the fact that the pool of nationals these countries have to pick from is very small and that alone makes conditions very difficult for them.

O&G. What are the reasons for this shortage?
JS. Traditionally HSE has been perceived as a less glamorous subject than the more high profile ones that graduates are attracted into such as marketing, finance, operations and strategy. I would not say necessarily that the pool of candidates is too small but that the lifecycle of taking someone from a graduate age to a qualified safety officer with experience takes quite some time.

When you get a graduate and put them through an HSE qualification it doesn’t necessarily mean straight away that they will be an instant great HSE professional. It takes time to take someone from the classroom to a position of competency so they can go out on site and manage these very complex risks.

O&G. How high a priority is HSE for oil and gas companies in the Middle East?
JS. The oil and gas industry has put HSE very high up on the corporate agenda. As a whole it’s a very high profile industry with high profile stakeholders.  Lots of the organisations we work with are governmental and they have lots of resources to invest in HSE.

So if they need additional financial resources to attract good people they do have that.

But HSE is a very scarce resource, whether you’re a Gulf company trying to attract people or a private international oil and gas company. There are always opportunities for improvement when you’re in a situation where workers are operating in very high-risk environments in large volumes with complex chemicals and machinery. You could have a plant with thousands of people or tens of thousands. You’re managing risk on that vast scale.

O&G. How competitive is the talent war for HSE professionals in the Middle East?
JS. At the moment what we’re seeing is that because the pool of good people is finite and the demand for oil is growing, we’re seeing some competition between countries.

People are being headhunted from where they work. We’re seeing that with nationals and expatriates and that increases the overall expenditure that the company would have to outlay on HSE.

Almost all of the companies we work with try to make it a core competency and it is certainly a source of competitive advantage when you are tendering, whether you are upstream or a downstream company. HSE is the main priority when you’re winning contracts or you’re looking to expand projects or work with international partners.

O&G. What is the BSC doing to help raise health and safety standards among Middle Eastern oil and gas companies?
JS. Developing workforce competency across the board is an area we’re working on with a number of companies with the aim of developing worker competency away from the traditional safety teams. Historically companies’ safety resource would be a safety department with a number of safety officers who would manage HSE for the whole organisation.

We’re encouraging companies to move away from that model and develop skills and competencies lower down the employer pyramid. By developing core competencies for a far greater number of employees you have much more of a team focus on safety. The cumulative effect of all those people contributing, even if it’s a small amount, is very powerful.

O&G. Can you give an example of how this approach has worked for a Middle East company in practice?
JS. We’ve been working with a number of high profile companies in the region. One particular one in North Africa has developed that model and has developed around 500 to 600 people with recognised HSE qualifications.

We run a series of new one-day qualifications, which we’re rolling out internationally. It has given these people a complex new skill set and they are now plugged into their safety performance and have seen around a 20 percent reduction in lost time incidents. The quantity and the quality of their reporting has gone up dramatically. There is a completely new set of channels reporting into the safety department through the line managers so you have safety broken down into much more of a departmental focus instead of one resource trying to tackle this enormous safety requirement which is almost impossible.

O&G. How are you able to provide training for Middle East based companies from your UK base?
JS. We’ve been working with ME companies and nationals for around 20 years. Traditionally people would have travelled to our UK corporate centre to take our qualifications here. But what we’ve done is bring the services far closer to our customers so they are far more able to take part in these development programmes.

What we’ve developed recently is a series of fairly unique short course qualifications. The main difference with those is that the organisation can take them on board on a licensed basis and run the qualifications themselves. That takes away the reliance on external companies.

A key aspect of our mission is empowering organisations to have the ability to run safety training courses internally.

We’ve developed a channel whereby we provide qualifications materials that companies can give to employees for self-study. Alternatively they can go down the classroom route or they can take a blended approach. It’s a far easier way of training volumes of people and gives companies discretion over the type of language that they use in their training materials.

O&G. What are you doing to encourage young people to pursue HSE as a career?
JS. One area we’re involved in is developing HSE skills before people enter the workplace.

This year we will develop around 80,000 school children in the UK.

From 2009 we will roll the scheme out internationally. The BSC has committed 10 million dollars of its charitable funds to support that programme over the next ten years because statistics show that people without formal HSE training when they enter the workplace for the first time are 50 percent more at risk than their adult equivalents.

We’re also in discussion with the Bahrain Labour Fund and Bahrain Training Institute about an initiative to develop 200 18 years olds. They recognised that their pool of HSE professionals is far smaller than they need particularly as their economy and oil and gas industry is expanding. What they are targeting now is 200 under grads with the two-year programme. At the end they will have 200 qualified junior safety managers.

O&G. How much specialised technical training do HSE professionals in the oil and gas industry require?
JS. It is a highly technical area. There is a series of core management skills then also some very specific industry expertise as well.

That changes depending on which part of the industry you are working in. For instance very different skills are required for those working in the upstream or the downstream sides of the business. Both require core HSE competencies then you would need specialised skills depending on the area you are working in.

O&G. Why does the Middle East oil and gas industry in particular require a stronger focus on HSE?
JS. The demand for its products is rising all the time. The industry is managing very complex risks each day, and the size of the sites is vast with thousands and often tens of thousands of workers to manage. There’s always pressure to increase reservoir yields and make new finds as the demand for energy increases. That will give them a number of HSE risks as they go into higher risk environments such as very deep water.

These companies are working with a very diverse mix of cultures. There’s lots of different behaviours and value systems and for managers trying to develop a positive safety culture that is very challenging. When you are increasingly workforce competencies and you are involved in workers away from the safety department that helps create a far more positive safety culture, which has a number of obvious benefits.

The British Health and Safety Council recently acquired e-learning solutions provider ComplyWise – which Justin says will enable it to enter “a new era of learning”.

We are going through an acquisition with comply wise, one of the UK’s leading health and safety e-learning providers. This will very much help us to achieve our goal being able to train large volumes of people.

The company provides e-learning training solutions on a range of different subjects focusing on health and safety.

“We’re very excited about this because it will mean that health and safety training is just a click away for thousands of people around the world. For instance oil company employees based on an oil rig will be able to easily access the training materials.

The company’s e-training solutions are already very big in the UK but it already has people accessing he services in 30 countries so far.”