Emerson Exchange 365

by Jim Montague

Installing process safety equipment and software? Easy. Getting people, groups and organizations to change their attitudes and habits? Close to impossible. So what can be done? Deliberate, persistent and targeted training, retraining, simulation and encouraging safety team members to speak up and intervene when needed.

"Seventy-five percent of accidents in industry are traceable to organizational and human factors," said Travis Hesketh, marketing vice president, Emerson Automation Solutions Europe. "In 2014, there were more than 3.7 million recordable injuries and 4,679 deaths in U.S. industries, costing $212 billion. So, we all know that safety incidents have a mixture of factors, and we've all seen the Swiss cheese diagram, where those factors, represented by holes, line up to enable an accident, but have you really thought about the impact and relevance of human factors in handovers, maintenance and documentation, environment, managing ambiguity, ignoring warning signals, and the team leader role?"

Handling handovers

"About 60% of all accidents or serious incidents occur within 30 minutes of a shift change, so we have to ask what key handovers are happening in our environments,” explained Julian Annison, principal industry consultant, Emerson Automation Solutions. “Are they recognized? Do we have a formal process in place? And how are we recording them? We also need to know what's the quality of our permit to work (PTW) handback, and is shift handover structured, given proper time and location? Finally, we also need to address how we're using modern tools to facilitate or automate handovers."

Annison and Hesketh investigated the human factors in business culture that can cause or prevent a disaster at Emerson Global Users Exchange.

Maintenance and documentation

Because it's often feast or famine when it comes to process safety information, Annison recommended that users examine how they secure the right data and get it to the right people in the way that's best for them to understand. "We find that many older plants have well-documented maintenance and that newer plants have good documentation in electronic formats," he said. "However, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, many plants seemed to be transitioning from paper to electronic, and so many typically have awful documentation, lost records and the least available information."

Much like the overall process control field, safety maintenance and documentation had also been coping with a vast range of staff and equipment turnovers. As a result, Annison added this is another area where users need to examine how well they're using modern tools to facilitate or automate it.

Working environment

One of the biggest factors contributing to process safety incidents is the staff's working environment, which includes time crunches, conflicting personalities and the agitation and stress they generate. However, many of these work-setting issues remain stubbornly hard to tackle because they're some one of the least discussed and understood problems.

"We need to ask how to create the best control room environment. Do ergonomics work? Where are interruptions and pressure coming from? Is it maintenance, PTW, managers or visitors? And how can we recognize when the operations team needs space, so they're not distracted?" added Annison.

Managing ambiguous situations

Because no process application or facility runs perfectly all the time, operators and engineers always have to manage their plants with something that isn't working properly. As a result, they must be aware of the conflicts and consequences this improper situation could cause and resolve them.

"We have to learn and prioritize the fundamental tools that operations need to run their applications and also identify what key instruments would create confusions and find out how they're backed up," said Annison. "We also need to know the culture of the team and learn if its members will just accept and run with any situation, or are they willing to speak up when an instrument or process instrument or process isn't running right?"

Ignoring alarms and warning signals

Though everyone in the process industries understands the surface aspects and issues of alarm overload and prioritization, Annison reported that many procedures for handling them remain unresolved, even basic policies such as how to report key alarms to operators, managers and maintenance.

"The main question is: Can the teams recognize those top-level, infrequent alarms? And will they know what to do?" asked Annison. "More recently, many alarms have become like a social-media deluge in recent years, and this is a big problem because a control room during a major incident is the true definition of data overload, as operators try to decide what to do. This is very difficult to overcome."

Team leader

Despite some gains in social equality and organizational politeness in recent years, Annison reported that process safety teams still need leaders and experienced followers, which means pecking orders still inevitably develop.

"Working culture and perceived hierarchies still occur in all teams," added Annison. "On static teams, individual personalities become dominant, and positive and negative consequences happen. So, it's important to ask: Do all shift teams perform the same, does management really know best, and does every person feel empowered to act to prevent a health, safety and environment issue?"

Call to action

To address these safety issues and improve these factors, Annison added it's vital for leaders to challenge their teams in three primary areas:

• Authority gradient—Review it and ask if anyone is on a pedestal and why. Who's driving decisions through on dubious ground? Who always gets their way? Update responsibilities, and remind team members about expectations for them to intervene. "There's a lot of leadership training, but little if any follower training," said Annison. "The goal is getting people to move from doing nothing before."
• Empowerment—Do all team members understand their responsibilities and obligations to speak and act? Team members must consider training others and themselves, where needed, and do it in a language that gives power to intervene in any situation. They must also support intervention by others. "Team members must learn to intervene when necessary, even against the will of a powerful leader," said Annison.
• Training—To maintain genuine safety competency, Annison advises teams to reexamine how well they actually train their members. This means getting beyond multiple-choice tests and stamping certificates; determining the best learning methods for each member; investigating if the training really increased competency; and especially including training in abnormal situations. "Are we validating that the right people have the right skills? Are we training them on normal startup, running and shutdowns; are we covering all credible failure scenarios; and are we giving them the skills to cope with the unknown scenarios?" asked Annison. "Finally, is the training realistic? Is it in a classroom or real life, and are we using technologies that are common elsewhere?"

Annison concluded, "So, is it possible to change the culture of process safety team members? The answer is 'yes' because there are a lot of positives. Pilots need to learn more than flying in a straight line; they need to learn takeoffs, landings and abnormal situations; and the same goes for process safety teams. We're fortunate that now we can set up virtual plants and processes to demonstrate and evaluate competence."