Best practices in occupational safety: the ability to speak out, stop-cards and a change in mentality

Topical issues and best practices in industrial safety were discussed in the framework of the All-Russian Occupational Safety and Health Week, held in Sochi. European companies operating in Russia presented their experience in this field.

“To err is human, but the influence of human factor on occurrence of emergency situations at workplace can be reduced,” said Chris Mawer, VP HSSE & Engineering Russia SPU BP. In his opinion, safety at workplace largely depends on the correct task setting. Otherwise prospects for correct and safe task performance are very slim. In addition, people should not be afraid of speaking their minds, including on safety issues. Only then one can expect staff’s genuine assistance in solving this issue, Chris Mawer is convinced.

In the Caspian Pipeline Consortium employees are also actively encouraged to give feedback. “We have moved away from the system of penalties as much as possible, resorting to them only in exceptional cases, as our experience has shown that incentives are more efficient,” said Nikolay Gorban, Managing Director of CPC (KTK-R). The Consortium has introduced the so-called stop-cards: a worker has the right to stop operation if in his opinion it could cause a dangerous situation. Then the cards are carefully analyzed at the Department of Occupational Safety. Furthermore the Consortium holds the Day of Safety every year, where work teams compete in the knowledge of occupational safety norms and rules. This helps employees to realize that it is them who need safety first of all.

Nikolay Gorban, Managing Director of CPC

Tatiana Bobrovitskaya, Shell HSSE General Manager, speaking about the behavior based safety, touched upon the topic of differences in culture and mentality. According to her in the West, the majority sees personal safety as an opportunity to save human life as the highest value. In Russia, for decades a culture of self-sacrifice in the name of an idea or a phenomenon has been developed.

In general, in order to achieve vision zero none of the elements shaping up safety at workplace should be ignored, believe participants in the round table discussion.