Lars Bagger Hviid

Author

Lars Bagger Hviid, Head of HSSEQ

Safety is a value, not a priority. Priorities change, but our commitment to safety is at the core of everything we do.

We are committed to putting safety at the core of everything we do. We believe in the principle that safety is not the absence of events, but rather the presence of defences and that is why, in 2018, Maersk Supply Service introduced Safety 2.0, a new framework on how we work with safety.

Safety 2.0 has three elements:

1. Safety as a capacity

Firstly, we want to have a safe work environment where we respond to and learn from incidents. Ultimately, we want to prevent incidents entirely. However, we also acknowledge that mistakes happen and when they do, we want to have the right safety barriers in place to ensure that we still have a safe work environment. A safety barrier can be anything from our employees wearing the proper personal protective equipment (PPE) to having the right processes in place. During 2019 and 2020, employees from all our vessels came with suggestions for how to improve our safety barriers, in what we called our ‘safe mistake initiative’. In total, almost 300 suggestions were submitted, 217 of which have been rolled out across the various vessels in the Maersk Supply Service fleet. All of this supported our ambition to create a safer work environment in Maersk Supply Service.

2. Just and joint accountability

Secondly, we want to instil a vigilant and objective safety culture that encourages a collective sense of responsibility for our safety mindset. For example, we are introducing a self-verification programme to assist our offshore management teams with a more structured approach for verifying safety-critical barriers in all operations, thereby mitigating risk in day-to-day tasks.

3. Strong learning and proactive mindset

Thirdly, we want to learn even more from our past experiences. When we have incidents, we always conduct an investigation to identify the root causes and how we can prevent similar incidents in the future. We want to streamline our incident investigation process further, by easing follow-up and doing more to take human factors into consideration when evaluating underlying causes.

Safety 2.0 diagram

A safe work environment

We believe no loss of life due to an accident at work is acceptable. This is also why we put multiple lines of defence in place to prevent incidents, from procedures and training to HSSE Critical Risk Controls, and much more besides. However, if ever these preventive defences fail and we do experience an incident, we still need additional mitigating measures in place to ensure our colleagues are not as seriously injured as they might otherwise have been. And that is the reason we have introduced Safety 2.0.

Share This Story