Background: Corinthian Petroleum, an offshore oil and gas producer, operated in an industrial safety landscape prone to high-risk incidents like equipment failures and worker injuries. Prior to changes, the company grappled with a traditional safety model that emphasized compliance over understanding human performance.
Before: The firm recorded 28 worker injuries per year, including slips from procedural errors, with investigations often blaming frontline staff. This led to low morale, underreported near-misses, and escalating costs from downtime in hazardous drilling operations.
Intervention: Apex embraced Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) strategies, applying two core pillars across their sites:
- Learn as a Team: Implemented facilitated Learning Teams for problem-solving after events, turning individual reports into group insights on behavioral and organizational factors.
- Respond with Resilience: Built resilience through HOP tools like error-proof checklists and crew resource management-inspired adaptations, focusing on human factors in high-pressure environments.
After: Injury rates fell by 50%, with a shift from blame to learning enabling proactive fixes that prevented major incidents. Operational uptime increased by 20%, saving millions in lost production, and the company fostered a culture where workers actively contributed to safety, aligning with industry trends toward HOP for sustained reliability in oil and gas.
