Safety at work: SPIE Oil & Gas Services celebrates 24 consecutive months without a lost-time accident

Cergy, 8 November 2021 - SPIE Oil & Gas Services, a subsidiary of SPIE, Europe's leading independent provider of multi-technical services in the energy and communications sectors, has recorded no lost-time accident since November 2019, achieving excellent safety results for the second year running.

A prevention policy close to the employees

With nearly 3,100 employees of 70 different nationalities working in 26 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, SPIE Oil & Gas Services gives top priority to the health and safety of its employees.

The international subsidiary specialised in the oil, gas and renewable energy industries is convinced that prevention is the key to achieve tangible results. This approach has paid off:

- No lost-time accidents occurred during 24 consecutive months in the entire scope of SPIE Oil & Gas Services' operations, i.e. 26 countries on four continents.
- SPIE Oil & Gas Services has been rewarded by 7 of its major clients in 2020 for its performance in terms of safety at work in the execution of its projects.

"We are very proud of this performance and welcome it humbly. This result is all the more remarkable given that the oil and gas industry is facing, on a daily basis, risks that can have significant human consequences. We remain extremely vigilant about the safety of our employees; we rely on the roll-out of our Life Saving Rules^[1] to renew our discourse and thus maintain our level of requirement”, comments Christophe Bernhart, Managing Director of SPIE Oil & Gas Services.

Throughout the year, managers in each SPIE Oil & Gas Services business unit are on the front line in organising preventive actions and discussions with operational teams, so that they can report their difficulties and identify the risks associated with their activities. In September 2021 alone, 26 preventive visits, 3,508 hours of training and 839 Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) "toolbox talks" were organised, demonstrating everyone's involvement regarding health and safety prevention.

Every month, unsafe conditions and accidents are also categorised according to their type of risk and then reported to the Operation Integrity Department : "We track down the origin of these accidents in order to identify the behaviours or equipment that needs to be rectified. Once a year, we also identify priority areas of focus and include them in the action plan for the coming year," says Richard Prim, Operation Integrity Director at SPIE Oil & Gas Services.

Safety management is also one of the essential criteria when selecting subcontractors: "we systematically inquire about their management system and their QHSSE policy and results, and about any certifications they may have, and we may even audit them if necessary. If we find significant deviations from our requirements, we support them in order to 'pull them up'," stresses Richard Prim.

2020, a special year

The Covid epidemic also represented a challenge for safety management, with employees exceptionally having to stay for up to six months on gas and oil sites, compared with a maximum of 30 days under normal circumstances. "In order to deal with this unprecedented situation, we had a lot of discussions with our partners to adjust our employees' working hours and rest periods. So that they did not feel isolated, we organised discussion sessions several times a month and gave them regular updates on the overall situation” explains Richard Prim.

Uniting teams around safety

To raise awareness on safety in workplaces, a safety challenge is organised every year for all SPIE Oil & Gas Services employees: two photo competitions were organised in 2019 and 2020, on the themes of "Health and Safety, everyone has a role to play" and " Slips, Trips and falls". In 2021, each SPIE Oil & Gas Services business unit will elect a "safety champion" who will be rewarded for his or her active participation in developing a safety culture.

_{[1] Safety campaign highlighting ten vital safety rules, taken from the SPIE Safety Code}