HSE Team Development and Team Building

Safety Team Development: From Disconnected Specialists to a Unified Mechanism

Building a strong HSE team is one of a manager's key tasks, especially during a large-scale reorganization. When a company unites many disconnected sites with different specifics (from retail to manufacturing plants), there is a need not just to hire qualified experts, but to teach them to work in unison. In her presentation, Valeria Lukina, Head of HSE at Beluga Group, shares practical experience in creating a motivational program that helped unite specialists from different time zones and business areas.

Safety Rodeo Program: Gamification for Cohesion and Growth

To solve the task of uniting the team, a year-long Safety Rodeo program was developed. Its main goal is not just to entertain employees, but to stimulate experience sharing, accelerate the development of unified standards, and increase engagement. The program included nine stages, each aimed at developing specific skills and competencies.

• Quizzes and informal communication: Games on abstract topics helped employees get to know each other and establish contact in an informal setting, which is especially important for distributed teams.
• Competency assessment and training: Testing (verbal, numerical, logical) and taking courses on the internal portal stimulated self-development. Importantly, test results remained confidential to avoid demotivation.
• Culture of gratitude: Implementing a system of mutual gratitude ("thank you") for specific actions contributed to creating a positive atmosphere and recognizing colleagues' achievements.
• Safety Creativity: Encouraging a creative approach to safety issues (creating posters, holding webinars, environmental campaigns) allowed stepping outside the routine and finding unconventional solutions.
• Sharing Good Practices: Regular meetings to present implemented improvements (from visualizing hazardous areas to new PPE standards) became a powerful tool for scaling successful experience across all sites.
• Project work (X-function): Distributing specific projects (developing standards, risk assessment, implementing new procedures) among employees allowed not only solving business tasks but also developing participants' leadership qualities.

Data Integration in Power BI: Transparency and Control

In addition to the motivational program, the speaker discusses the approach to automating the collection and analysis of safety data. Instead of expensive IT solutions, the company used a combination of regular Excel spreadsheets (checklists) and the Power BI system. This allowed creating clear dashboards for management, reflecting the status of action implementation, the percentage of compliance with standards, and key metrics (days without incidents, safety pyramid, environmental indicators).

This approach ensured process transparency and gave local specialists a convenient tool for self-assessment and planning corrective actions, while avoiding excessive bureaucracy.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to develop and implement a motivational program for the HSE department without involving external contractors and budgets?
• Which gamification stages are most effective for uniting a distributed team?
• How to encourage employees to share best practices and implement them at their sites?
• How to organize project work within the department to accelerate the development of safety standards?
• How to visualize HSE metrics with minimal costs using Power BI?