Energy-sector employers are being told there's a scarcer resource than oil or gas - their employees.
Safety is much more than just erecting protective barriers or trying to understand why smart people do stupid things, a recent oilpatch safety conference was told.
"With higher energy prices (and industry expansion) we have to keep bringing it (the safety message) to the forefront," says Cyril Cox, organizing committee chairman of the Petroleum Safety Conference, which attracted 950 delegates earlier this month to Banff.
"We're making companies aware that you can't afford to have injuries. You have to make sure your people are well trained, because they are the lifeblood of your company. If they get hurt, you're going to get hurt, too."
The theme of this year's conference was "Journey to Safety," and Cox points out there is really no one safety issue that stands out above the rest in the petroleum sector.
Two of the conference speakers, Linda Duxbury, one of Canada's leading workplace health researchers, and Chicago-based author and speaker Laurence Gonzales, brought non-traditional safety messages to the conference.
Duxbury, a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Ottawa's Carleton University, says an employee's mental health is just as important a safety issue as the more conventional aspects of workplace safety.
"It's about an employee's mental health and the need to deal with workloads," she says.
"You need to stop dealing with bottom lines and getting employees and managers to donate their nights and weekends. You've got to cut down on the Blackberries and e-mails that eat into their downtime and increase stress levels.
"The expectation is that you're always there, that you can provide a fast answer. It's just not realistic."
Canada and other industrialized countries are now moving into what Duxbury calls a "profound seller's market for labour," which she believes will turn the workplace model on its head.
For the past 30 years, companies have had more good people than jobs, she says.
This has allowed them to focus on shareholder value, returns on investment and "to engage in a whole bunch of practices that actually were harmful of employers and managers: Things such as cutting back staff but not cutting back work and getting rid of secretarial and administrative support."
"You had highly trained managers and professionals spending a good chunk of their day doing low-value work," she adds. "The whole idea was, 'you're lucky to have a job.' They (companies) didn't manage people, they managed the bottom line."
This has translated into stressed-out, burned-out and overworked employees who are not safe at work.
Duxbury says that companies need to broaden their thinking about what constitutes a safe workplace.
"It's not just about physical things, it's about workload," she says. "Organizations that don't pay attention to people with effective management of their people will become extinct. They'll go the way of the dinosaur and be replaced by organizations that get it."
A completely different perspective to workplace safety was presented by Gonzales, who has spent most of his career studying accidents and specializes in why people do the things they do.
Gonzales says smart employees can often end up doing stupid things. These are actually "intelligent" mistakes that involve behavioural scripts - expected behaviours for a given situation.
Behavioural scripts are a good thing, says Gonzales, as they automate tasks so that people don't have to think about them, or relearn behaviours such as tying a shoelace.
But these routines, or mental models, can also cause blockages in the way the brain perceives things, such as when you can't find something that is right in front of you.
"If you have a mistaken mental model in your mind, you won't see it. You're looking for a blue book, when it's a red one," says Gonzales.
For example, an oilrig worker could perform the same job day in and day out for years - but then a new procedure may be added, requiring a change in the behavioural script.
"You have to recognize that you will go on autopilot as soon as you can, as soon as you learn it well enough. But in our very complex and artificial world it can lead us to do things that can hurt us," says Gonzales.
"You have to stop and think and pay attention. This is a process. There's a trade-off between efficiency and your ability to control this process. You're going to give up efficiency."
As long as a person realizes that "no learned behaviour is right forever - that things always change - you'll recognize that this is an ongoing process of re-evaluating what you're doing," he adds.
Meanwhile, other safety issues facing the petroleum sector include fatigue, the use of cellphones while driving - a bad habit that needs to be broken, according to Cox - and ensuring that young people realize the need for safety training if they enter this field. "The young people, they're the ones that are going to be the safety professionals of the future," says Cox.
"We want them to be aware there is a lot of training that is required as we're dealing with labour shortages in the skilled areas."
(Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)
