Key Approaches to Building Safety Leadership

Evolution of Safety Culture: From Instructions to the Human Factor

The modern approach to occupational safety has long moved beyond specialized departments. Safety is the working style of the entire enterprise, which directly depends on the position of top management. In her presentation, Tatiana Bobrovitskaya, a representative of Shell, examines the evolution of corporate safety culture: from the implementation of the Hearts and Minds program in the early 2000s, which shifted the focus from technical instructions to people's conscious attitudes, to the modern concepts of Human Performance and Learner Mindset.

The speaker emphasizes an important paradigm shift: mistakes are inevitable because they are made by living people. The main task of a modern safety system is to create conditions where a mistake will not lead to fatal consequences. For this, the psychological safety of the environment is critically important. If employees fear punishment, they hide incidents and potentially dangerous situations, depriving the company of the opportunity to learn lessons and prevent future accidents.

The Role of Top Management and Cross-Functional Interaction

The role of a leader is especially relevant for Russian enterprises with their pronounced hierarchical structure. Top management not only sets the tone and allocates resources but also performs a crucial integration function. The speaker notes that incidents often occur at the intersection of different departments' areas of responsibility. It is the leader who can overcome this fragmentation by building effective interaction between departments and making safety a shared task, rather than solely the problem of a specialized service.

Five Habits of an Effective Safety Leader

The presentation details specific behavioral patterns that a manager must demonstrate to build a reliable safety culture:

• Attitude towards incidents: shifting the focus from finding and punishing the guilty to caring for the victim and learning lessons. This is a basic condition for creating a psychologically comfortable environment and launching a continuous learning process.
• Focus on high-risk areas: the manager's personal attention to the most dangerous types of work (e.g., helicopter transport) and quality control of their organization.
• Clear definition and communication of goals: personnel must clearly understand what safety metrics the company is striving for.
• Addressing potential dilemmas: open discussion of conflicts between the speed of work execution and safety. Ignoring these issues at the planning stage inevitably leads to increased risks (e.g., due to staff fatigue).
• Systematic work on mistakes: understanding existing gaps and maintaining a continuous cycle of improvements.

Safety in Joint Ventures and Pre-Deal Risk Assessment

A separate section of the presentation is devoted to the specifics of working in joint ventures, where the interests and corporate cultures of different shareholders collide. Using the example of Shell's partnerships in Russia, the speaker shows how a dialogue is built to align safety standards. The most important stage of this work begins even before contracts are signed: the company conducts a deep assessment of the HSE risks of a potential asset. The presence of insurmountable restrictions (for example, working in national parks) can cause a deal to be rejected, while in other cases, requirements to bring the asset up to corporate safety standards are embedded directly into the structure of the agreement.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• Why is the Human Performance concept replacing traditional approaches to safety?
• How to create a psychologically safe environment where employees are not afraid to report mistakes?
• What five habits distinguish an effective HSE leader?
• How to properly respond to incidents to prevent their recurrence?
• How are HSE risks assessed during the creation of joint ventures and mergers?