Working Safely Every Day
Employee health and safety lie at the foundation
of our efforts to build a talented,
dynamic workforce. A fully productive
employee must be safe and secure first.
The health and safety of our employees
and contractors hold critical value for our
business. We are investing in this "human
energy" resource through our continuing
efforts to make processes safer and
provide all workers with the tools and
information they need to do their jobs
right every time. Over the past 10 years,
Chevron's efforts to create a safety culture show strong continued improvement. For
the seventh consecutive year, we improved
our Days Away From Work Rate, which
makes Chevron one of the safest energy
companies in our peer group. We are now
four times safer as a company than we
were in 2003. Our Pascagoula, Mississippi,
refinery and our Australasia and Europe
business units recorded no Days Away
From Work injuries in 2008, a period covering
more than 20 million hours without a
recordable incident.
Through our Operational Excellence
Management System, we continue to
improve our formal processes and structures
that support safe operations, not just
for our nearly 62,000 direct employees
but also for the almost 200,000 contractors
who work at Chevron sites on any
given day. We strengthened our Incident
Investigation and Learning program,
for example, by adding a focus on high-learning-value events. A team examines all recent major incidents regularly
throughout the year. If identified as a
high-learning-value event, the incident is
analyzed for root causes and the results
are communicated throughout the
organization.
We continued to focus on improving
Process Safety Management at our facilities
during 2008. We collected data on
Loss of Containment, a new metric that
will help us improve our performance. We
also continued in-depth analysis of major
incidents to determine the root causes,
communicate the lessons learned and identify
recommended actions. As a result of
these studies, we are emphasizing operational
discipline to ensure we have the
systems, processes and behaviors aligned
so that every member of the workforce
carries out every task the right way, every
time. In this program, the responsibilities
of management and workers are clarified
and reinforced.
If a worker feels that he or she does not
have the tools or knowledge to do the
job safely, then the worker is required
to stop work, consult with the supervisor
and fix the deviation. Management is
responsible for enabling and empowering
every employee to develop his or her
own operational discipline. We developed
communication tools for spreading this message throughout the corporation,
ranging from "safety moments" to in-depth
workshops. While locations can customize
the tools to fit their own needs, a key goal is
to promote safety in our processes by standardizing
the way a process is conducted,
whether the operation occurs in Angola,
Brazil, Kazakhstan or the United States.
In 2008, we achieved record safety results
for the year, with a Days Away From Work
Rate of 0.05, a fivefold improvement over
the 0.25 rate in 2002.
Establishing Common
Safety Practices Among Chevron
Staff and Contractors
Chevron Downstream established a common
safety system across all sites, the
Loss Prevention SystemTM. It emphasizes
the need for each employee to assess
risks before doing a task by asking a
simple question: What's the worst thing
that could happen to me in this situation?
Employees should then make sure
they have the right tools and knowledge
to prevent any unacceptable outcomes.
Workers are empowered to stop what
they're doing if their self-assessment
reveals that they don't have proper safety
equipment or if they are not sure of the
risks inherent in the task. As a representative
of one of our major contractors, Daniel
Breaux from Atlantic Scaffolding is helping deploy the system at our Pascagoula,
Mississippi, refinery.
Breaux emphasizes how valuable the
system can be for a very large facility with
multiple contractors onsite: "I've been at
the Pascagoula Refinery for about two
years. The Loss Prevention SystemTM is
beneficial to everyone who works inside
a refinery, not only Chevron personnel
but contractors as well. It gives us the
opportunity to all talk from the same page.
Instead of five different companies using
five different safety systems, we're all using
the same tools. Once we're inside this gate,
we're all in this together — I don't want to
see anybody get hurt."
Our Drive to Improve Motor Vehicle Safety
Vehicle incidents are the largest cause of
fatalities within the oil and gas industry.
We are working to improve our workforce's
awareness of road safety whether they are
driving on the job or commuting.
In 2008, we completed a study of 87 major
motor vehicle incidents that occurred in
2006 and 2007 across the corporation,
with the goal of identifying trends and
common root causes. We began communicating
the findings throughout the
company during the last quarter of 2008,
and we are implementing updated training
tools designed to address common root
causes of incidents, such as excessive
speeding or miscalculating situational
risks. The study also identified improvements
to some of our existing driver
training programs and contractor performance
monitoring procedures, which we
are implementing as a result. Revamped training and driver monitoring activities
are expected to continue during 2009.
Building Healthy Communities
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause
of death in the United States, claiming
more than 600,000 lives in the country
each year and millions more worldwide.
The World Health Organization reports
that by the year 2020, heart disease will
surpass infectious disease as the world's
leading cause of death and disability, posing
a threat to our global workforce.
During 2008, Chevron continued to
implement its new cardiovascular health
program for employees. This program takes
a preventive approach by giving employees
the tools and incentives to understand their
own risk factors for heart disease and to
take steps that will improve their cardiovascular
health. Employees who choose
to participate in the program take an
assessment asking them about their health
indicators. The program then evaluates
their risk factors and makes personalized
recommendations on how to lower risks.
It offers online self-help resources, educational
materials and even a customized
mentoring program with a health coach,
all of which are offered free of charge.
The program was piloted in Nigeria, in
the Philippines, and in the United States
at the Pascagoula Refinery. Beginning in
September 2008, the program was opened
to all U.S.-payroll employees; it will roll out
globally in 2009. Our investment in the cardiovascular health of employees, we
firmly believe, will lead to increased productivity,
reduced lost-work time and more
motivated employees.
In some areas where Chevron employees
and families live, medical services are
severely lacking. We have an opportunity
to improve community health significantly
in those operating locations. Improving the
health status of the whole community has
direct, positive effects on our workers and
their families as well as on our potential
future workforce.
Our approach to community health
continues to evolve and take advantage
of synergies between many existing
programs. This year, a major focus is
on developing a holistic approach that
responds to community needs. We are
looking to bring efforts in HIV/AIDS,
malaria and tuberculosis together in a
coordinated way that addresses local
needs and includes environmental, social
and economic aspects.
For instance, around our Nigerian
operations, we have conducted HIV/AIDS
awareness, prevention and treatment
activities since 2001 and, in some locations,
supported anti-malaria efforts through
community medical clinics. During 2008,
we worked with partners in the Corporate
Alliance on Malaria in Africa to develop a
strategic business plan based on a vision
of integrated support for sustainable
community health. We plan to leverage
our involvement in the country coordinating
mechanisms — steering committees
for each country where The Global Fund
to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is
active — to test the feasibility and effectiveness
of this integrated community health
approach. Chevron has already been
invited to participate in the coordinating
mechanisms for Nigeria.
Updated: May 2009