The "Perfect HSE Day" - A Solution that is Making Zero Incidents a Reality
Authors: Peresypkin Sergey , Hinton J. Jack , Kuykendall Dina 
Published: December 2014

A variety of industries, oil and gas included, have tried and have progressed a variety of approaches to improve HSE performance. Unfortunately, while incidents still occur, it is the general consensus that most workplaces across the vast majority of industries are safer today than they were 20 years ago, 50 years ago; and particularly, more than they were 100 years ago. Not to understate the role that the change in societal demand has had, safer workplaces are in large part due to the efforts of regulatory bodies, academia, specialized consultants, HSE professionals, and industry leaders who have advanced attention and improvements in not only workplace safety, but focused on the occupational health implications of work, and the impact work can have on the environment. Early on, these improvements were based on simple recognition and elimination of obvious hazards. Through time, particularly over the past couple decades, efforts have focused on the role that culture and human factors play in the workplace as the present frontier to drive HSE performance improvements.

Typical to most human factor and culture approaches, at their center are: behavior, leadership and/or interdependency. Historically, the attempt has been to pursue each of these separately, though sometimes in combination, as evidenced through the myriad variations of Behavior-Based Safety programs, Safety Leadership programs, and Safety Culture programs used across the industry today. In 2010, Baker Hughes internally developed an approach that uniquely linked each of these central ingredients to capture the synergy of the interactions between behavior, leadership and interdependency. The approach, launched as the HSE Leadership Academy, successfully evolved the organization's culture to produce the belief that being incident free is possible. Coined the Perfect HSE Day, this mindset says zero incidents is not only achievable, it is sustainable.

The Perfect HSE Day is now a central feature of the company's solutions to making zero HSE incidents a reality. The performance improvements that have occurred since its introduction in 2013 are pronounced, and are in large part attributed to it being a natural, self-introduced creation of the synergy that is being witnessed through real change in employee HSE Behaviors, real change in HSE Leadership and a palatable shift further in Interdependent HSE Culture.

This paper addresses the concept of collective ownership and the key actions that Baker Hughes has taken to use the Perfect HSE Day as the next step in the journey to an Interdependent HSE Culture that will deliver Zero Incidents. The evidence this step is real and sustainable is: the authentic HSE ownership by employees;the bridging of the cultural differences across a multinational workforce;the affinity established between the company's values and each individual's values;the command it requires for interdependence and team effort to accomplish;the simplicity for everyone to understand and internalize; and,the direct connection of employees with a personalized measure of HSE performance.