Shaping a Safety Culture: From Prevention to Protection

Challenge

A North American energy company with a dynamic team of over 5,000 employees and contractors wanted to reinforce their culture and commitment to safety, ensuring that injury prevention remained a top priority at every level of the organization. Despite maintaining a recordable injury rate of under 0.2, the company still faced serious near-misses and incidents, highlighting the need for continuous improvement.

While the company had a well-established safety management system, it became clear that critical safety leadership skills were insufficient. Additionally, a gap was identified at the frontline—employees were not consistently adhering to the safety programs and procedures that had been developed over time. To address these challenges, leadership sought expert guidance to tackle their safety performance issues directly, bringing in a fresh perspective for meaningful change.

dss⁺ Approach

Partnering with dss⁺, the first step was to change leadership’s mindset—elevating safety from just a priority to a core value deeply integrated into the company’s culture, rather than something they simply needed to address. dss⁺ propelled leaders to create the presence of safety within their culture. In doing so, safety would be naturally rooted in every decision and action throughout the organization.

To move forward, dss⁺ facilitated workshops for 1,200 leaders and spent over 1,000 hours on in-the-field leadership coaching over a 12-month period.

The training helped develop safety leadership styles and practices that focused on three areas:

• Creating a Positive Safety Interaction with individual workers
• Facilitating an Effective Field Safety Conversation with crews
• Verifying the Presence of SIF Critical Protection with crews

After 12 months, the program produced dramatic improvement: The company’s recordable injury rate fell by 74% to 0.032, with a similar improvement in SIF potential incident occurrences. To sustain the teachings into the culture, dss⁺ built and trained a team of internal coaches and trained them on content, methodologies, and programs to sustain and continue the improvements once the engagement ended.

Assignment

To improve the company’s safety culture and make it sustainable.

Offering

Safety Performance Excellence System

Impact

• A 74% improvement in recordable injury rate over a 12-month span.
• The successful training of 1,200 leaders. 
• More than 1,000 hours of in the field coaching.
•  Internal capabilities were built to sustain changes and drive continuous improvement moving forward.