Improving Environmental and Occupational Health Performance Through a HSE Management System—A Seven-Year Case Study

摘要

Environmental and health issues are frequently nettlesome and often costly if left unaddressed. Within the last 40 years many industrialized countries have developed laws for protecting citizen’s health and the environment. These laws have helped in the development of regulations minimizing the impact of environmental and occupational health issues. Translated to the workplace, these regulations drive companies to develop programs with a structured and consistent approach that will protect its workers, minimize its impact on the environment, and protect communities in which it does business. The implementation of a management system provides both governances in an easy-to-use fashion. This constructive means of facilitating, fostering and encouraging performance has shown very dramatic results throughout an oilfield service company. In 2000, the firm developed a health, safety and environmental management system that included standards to which company operations would adhere. Since the company operates in a number of countries, the standards were written in a general nature to allow for incorporation of local requirements. Each company location throughout the world was charged with implementing the requirements of the management system and making the changes necessary to conform to the corporate management system and the local regulations. Within a year of implementing the management system, audits were scheduled and performed at company facilities to confirm implementation and provide suggestions for further improvement to the management system. A scoring system was used to compare progress made by different sites within the same geographical area as well as progress made by locations throughout the company. This paper examines the cultural shift, attitudinal redirection and resultant changes in the company’s business activities in the occupational health and environmental sectors. This includes the integration of risk assessments and job safety analyses, emergency response planning and training, and annual auditing as tools to improve performance with the results from more than 50 countries over seven years charted.