Page 128 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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106 Serious Incident Prevention

Contractor safety
Mechanical integrity
Facility and fixed-equipment inspections

The company safety policy documents and communicates the organi-
zation’s core values regarding safety performance. The policy should ad-
dress prevention of serious incidents and protection of the public in addition
to prevention of common injuries among employees and contractors. An in-
creasing proliferation of policy statements has become a workplace real-
ity—statements addressing safety, environmental, quality, diversity,
harassment, and other issues. A growing competition has developed, not
only for conference room wall space, but for comprehension in the minds
of employees. A safety policy is most effective when it is developed with
employee input, and is concise, easy to understand, and sufficiently com-
prehensive in scope.

Facility/Operating Level Standards

Goals and objectives generated at each level of the organization need to
be clearly documented together with action plans for achievement. Specific
guidelines for execution of critical work should be established to provide
criteria for excellence and promote consistency of actions. A company with
multiple locations may develop guidelines applicable to all facilities or may
look to each site for development of facility specific guidelines. In practice,
some combination of corporate and site-specific guidelines is the norm. The
importance of employee involvement in the development of standards is a
constant for all levels of the organization—top management through first
level. Managers and teams having the opportunity for input are more likely
to proceed with support rather than resistance.
A facility’s safe-practices manual can serve as an effective method for
documenting many operating and maintenance-related safety standards. A
safe-practices manual provides guidance for work routinely performed—
guidance impacting the performance of critical work by numerous employ-
ees and contractors. Facility-wide standards must be based on sound
risk-management practices. A sufficient margin of safety must be included
in the standards to ensure jobs can be performed hundreds and thousands of
times without creating conditions leading to a serious incident.
At the facility and departmental level, managers and their teams are ex-
pected to implement actions to ensure that company goals, objectives, poli-
cies, and guidelines are fully realized. For example, compliance with a
corporate guideline for process equipment inspections may require manu-