Beyond safety: Shaping a future of health and wellbeing in the industry

Introduction

I want to start by telling you a story.

About a colleague working in our industry.

This technician – an experienced, competent person.

Inexplicably left a valve open, leading to a large spill.

Except it wasn’t inexplicable. Because the technician hadn’t slept all night due to the noise on the facility.

Studies suggest that being awake for 24 hours is like having a blood alcohol level that would prevent you from driving in some countries.

He’d effectively been asleep at the hand wheel.

While everything had been done to make sure that piece of equipment worked well.

Very little had been done to ensure he was well enough to work.

I have a confession here.

For most of my career – including eight of those as bp’s head of global operations – “health” was not a big priority for me.

Even when I became SVP for HSE and Carbon in 2018, I still considered myself a safety man.

For me, health – physical and mental – was secondary.

But the longer I’ve been in the job, the more I’ve seen it. 

That when something has gone wrong, then usually, somewhere along that chain, there’s been an exhausted technician, a distracted supervisor, a stressed manager.

I’m an engineer, and yet I’d missed the vital equation here.

It’s not health and safety; health is safety.

When our people become healthier, we are all safer.

Yet in industry today, health is often downgraded, downplayed, dismissed.

Many of us, in many sectors, have been asleep here too.

And it’s time we all woke up – woke up to the importance of wellbeing.

Our industry has been on a journey these past few years.

Things have improved.

But we’ve got to move faster, travel further, be much bolder.

And that is what I want to talk about today.

Past 

But first – how did we get to this point?

What’s gone wrong?

Why is it that safety comes before health?

I think one reason is that a safety breach is often far more immediate than a health breach.

If a task causes someone to lose a finger, it’s obvious.

If work leads to someone developing lung cancer 20 years later, it’s far less so.

There’s another reason.

As we improved engineering – as we eliminated harmful materials like asbestos – we assumed we’d engineered the health risks out of industry.

Of course we hadn’t.

Health risks remain.

In oil and gas, they’re constant, numerous, and need to be carefully managed.

They include risks like hazardous substances, noise, vibration, heat, infectious diseases.

As in many industries, they can be compounded by challenging conditions, like remote locations, long shifts and high-stress environments.

For workers across all sectors, the impact of poor health can far outweigh poor safety.

Look at the data.

Latest estimates indicate that, in 2019, there were nearly three million work-related deaths, globally.

Of those, 300,000 were due to workplace accidents – what we would consider to be “safety”.

The rest died due to illness from exposure to workplace factors – in other words, poor health caused by their job.

Present

Yet here we are today.

In a world where some leaders only pay lip service to health.

It’s one thing to say we care equally about health and safety.

Isn’t it, in practice, very much little h, big S?

Some of you might have seen it in your organisations.

Health professionals only brought in at the last minute.

Or in the aftermath of an event.

Or not at all.

Or only when mass global health outbreaks, like Covid, hit.

You might have seen how hard occupational health is to access – particularly for shift workers and remote workers.

According to research, fewer than half of UK employees have direct access to such services .

Even though mental health conditions and chronic illnesses are often the cause of long-term absence.

There are awards for best practice in safety. I have yet to see a health award receive the same level of recognition.

And there is, I’m sad to say, still a culture of machismo I hear about in parts of our industry.

“I did a 24-hour shift.”

“Well I worked 30 hours straight.”

Does that ring any bells for anyone?

It’s rarer these days, for sure – but my observation is that this attitude is still out there.

Now, that is wrong in any environment.

Frankly, in oil and gas, it’s crazy.

Things might have improved in recent years.

But there’s still a long way to go.Let me give you an example.

Recent studies show that in our industry more than 3 in 5 workers are exposed to hazardous noise levels.

Yet over a quarter of them do not wear hearing protection.

Seriously.

Another study revealed that one in five oil and gas workers report depression, anxiety or substance abuse.

The industry’s suicide rate is – I’m afraid to say – far higher than the average.

Yet we’re seeing a trend offshore of more people spending their downtime on their phones, or in their rooms.

What is going on here?

I think what is happening to health is what sometimes happens to safety.

When we haven’t had any well-known disasters directly linked to safety failures, people assume that safety is, well, safe.

But that starts to breed complacency.

People think, “we’ve got safety all sewn up”.

I often say that the worst thing for a good safety performance is a good safety record.

Well, it’s the same for health.

No major health-related incidents lately.

Can mean no major focus on the issue of health and wellbeing.

Future 

So that’s how we got here and what the situation looks like now.

But how do we turn this around?

How do we improve our employees’ mental and physical wellbeing?

I am optimistic.

I may not sound it, but really I am.

Yes, health may have been relegated.

Yes, complacency may have set in.

But the call for change is growing louder.

Just as the link between mental and physical health is becoming better understood and appreciated.

And just as game-changing technologies are coming on stream.

We should therefore be galvanised by the urgency and bolstered by the opportunity.

This is our moment to put health not only higher up our list of concerns as an industry

But to make it a top priority for oil and gas.

To be an industry that leads on health.

That is lauded for health.

So here is my ten-point plan for getting there.

One: be proactive, not reactive.

Because intervening early is better at preventing long-term sickness and supporting workforce resilience.

Two: put health professionals at the top table, not just in times of crisis.

We must value them, champion them and support them to do their work.

A health professional is for life, not just for Covid.

But we shouldn’t leave it all to them.

That’s number three: workforce wellbeing should be understood, owned and championed by all leaders, especially operating leaders.

This is a job for us all.

Four: move towards “total worker health” – the holistic approach.

The relationship between mental and physical health – and its impact on performance and safety – must infuse all our strategies.

Five: monitor and measure health and wellbeing with cutting-edge technology.

We already detect fatigue in our drivers by tracking eye movements and reaction times.

But there is a whole load of transformational tech that can revolutionise health.

Wearables that show everything from stress to hydration levels.

Predictive analytics that flag risks by monitoring behavioural patterns.

Smart PPE, like helmets that detect air quality and boots that highlight falls.

AI-driven sentiment analysis that spots when mental health is declining.

These are the modern-day equivalents of the canary in the coalmine.

Alerting us to danger long before any human can detect it.

We can all get on and use them. Pioneer them.

Six: report and share our data and our approaches.

That means a real culture of honesty – about success and failure.

There should be psychological safety around reporting bad practice.

Meanwhile, best practice should be spread within and between companies.

And by the way – let’s elevate those awards for health in oil and gas. Innovation in this space deserves recognition and admiration.

Seven: learn from other industries.

Airlines are seen as the pinnacle of safety, in part due to the wellbeing of their pilots.

Their approaches contain lessons for us all. Let’s study them and emulate what they do well.

Eight: reconnect health and safety.

Our data shows how closely linked the two are. I believe every element of safety training should come with a health warning.

There should not be one without the other.

Being well enough to operate the machine is as vital as being skilled enough to operate the machine.

And by the way – that machine should not pose any risks to its operator’s health.

Nine: link health and wealth.

There is no doubt: helping people maintain good health is good for business – it makes them more productive.

But the opposite is also true – poor health can impact productivity and damage your business.

We must start to see health as a productivity enabler, not just a compliance obligation.

Finally, number ten: we must promote good health for all.

It’s tempting to think that our focus in this area should be on those who are directly on our payroll. And in many ways, of course, that makes sense.

But if you think about it, the consequences of poor health can be catastrophic whoever is involved.

Employee or contractor. Permanent staff or temp.

Their health is essential to everyone’s safety, whatever their employment status.

And when it comes to contractors, I think there really is room for improvement.

Right now we say, if you have a fit for task certificate, you’re OK to work on our facility.

But ask yourself: is that always OK?

The quality of the medicals varies wildly across the world. What we insist on for our own employees may not always be guaranteed for external colleagues.

There is scope here to drive greater consistency – in more than just medicals.

Industrial hygiene. Occupational health. Wellbeing.

If something is considered important for employees, isn’t it important for contractors too?

Community health

True leadership in this space is not only about looking internally at our own organisations and those with whom we work closely.

Understanding the health concerns of people living close to our operations is a licence to operate issue for our industry.

And just as we cannot be complacent in our approach to the health of our employees, we cannot be complacent in our approach to community health.

This is a related topic – a big topic – and probably too big for the time I’ve got today.

But we must ask ourselves, is there more we can do, to build relationships, to understand challenges, and to better manage health risks to wider communities?

Because a mission to promote good health cannot end at the perimeter fence.

Conclusion

You might think I haven’t given our industry enough credit for the progress we have made on health.

I do think we have evolved over time.

But I believe we need to step it up, get out in front.

We shouldn’t just be heeding health and wellbeing.

We should be leading on health and wellbeing.

All of us in this room can play a role. You might say, this isn’t my forte. I say: make it your forte.

Let’s measure health.

Elevate health.

Celebrate health.

Reward health.

Health and safety. Capital H, capital S.

So let’s define that gold standard in safety and in health.

Let’s set the good example that others wish to follow.

Let’s step up to the challenge.

As you can see, I’ve been on a journey on this issue.

I hope you will join me now as we move forward – going further, faster, together.

Thank you.