Italian oil major Eni conducted an analysis of the majority of safety events occurring within the company, in particular fatalities or serious injuries. The analysis showed that the two most recurrent major factors were inadequate supervision and incorrect perception of actual exposure to operational risks.
The incorrect perception of risks appeared to be caused usually by a lack of training and lack of knowledge of minimum basic principles on how to execute an activity.
If supervisors are lacking in these aspects, their leadership and the transfer of knowledge to front-line workers will be ineffective.
Eni Upstream, therefore, developed a tool with the aim of determining the level of safety knowledge and competencies of all supervisory personnel, thus identifying all safety areas that might need a specific, customized, and effective training approach that could fill competency gaps and strengthen safety supervision at work site. Increased competence would, in turn, improve the perception of risk.
The company’s Safety Competence Assessment (SCA) tool is a web-based, two-phase tool that allows users (supervisors involved in the program) to assess their knowledge and competencies in a number of safety aspects including safety leadership; basic content of safety procedures; health, safety, and environment (HSE) integrated management system principles; simultaneous operations; and emergency response.
During the first stage, the selected employees are confronted with open and closed questions that allow for the customization of answers based on the employees’ assigned working environments.
The second stage requires the involvement of HSE managers and human-resources representatives to review all answers during a face-to-face discussion with the workers. This stage is aimed at the final consolidation of the user’s assessment results (with possible amendments and incorporations by managers) and the identification of customized training paths that are facilitated by the HSE function.
Through the SCA tool, all managers have access to valuable statistical information that could effectively help in determining areas of strengths and areas of improvements of single individuals as well as homogeneous groups or specific sites, further enhancing the effectiveness of the training that will be provided to the workforce and ultimately supervisory competence and knowledge.