Report Dec. 15, 2022
Leading in personnel safety
At ExxonMobil, our people are our most valuable resource. We have a long history of embedding safety into our culture. The culture is reinforced by safety leadership, standards, practices and experience. We focus on an integrated framework of systems, processes, tools, and behaviors aimed at eliminating injuries and fatalities. We aspire to an environment where Nobody Gets Hurt and our Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) demonstrates results from our top tier safety programs. In 2021, we maintained industry-leading results with a LTIR of 0.02 per 200,000 work hours1. We plan to build-on this industry-leading position.
Report Dec. 15, 2022
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Approach
ExxonMobil is committed to protecting the safety, security and health of our employees, our contractors and others involved with our operations as well as our customers and the public. These commitments are documented in the Safety, Health, Environment and Product Safety policies found in our Standards of Business Conduct.
Our work in this area is put into practice through Operations Integrity Management System, or OIMS, which guides the daily activities of our global workforce by setting clear expectations for managing the risks inherent to our business. The OIMS framework goes beyond our employees to include third-party providers and contractors. We include specific safety and health expectations in contractual agreements with these third parties.
We focus on delivering consistent, sustainable results through OIMS and leaders engage with their teams to drive effective application. Each business unit has leadership management systems and work processes aimed to consistently meet operations objectives.
Objectives
Personnel safety at ExxonMobil has one primary objective: Nobody Gets Hurt. To that end, we continue to drive process improvements that support ExxonMobil’s employee safety vision. For example, in 2021, we revised our Incident Investigation Framework to be consistent with International Oil & Gas Products (IOGP) 621 and incorporated enhanced investigation techniques and learning standards.
Beyond working to ensure our safety protocols are in line with international best practices whenever appropriate, ExxonMobil has implemented additional initiatives in recent years focused on preventing serious injuries associated with lifting and rigging, as well as working around mobile equipment. These included the development of the Life Saving Rules & Actions program, designed for workers and leaders to verify safeguards are in place before starting work and are maintained throughout execution.
In all cases, our objective is clear. Do all that we can to continuously examine our processes and protocols and make changes necessary to strive for an even safer environment where Nobody Gets Hurt.
Management and application
We establish annual continuous improvement goals and objectives in a number of areas, including:
Personnel safety future state
To further reduce or eliminate life-altering injuries, ExxonMobil has assembled a team to develop the future state of personnel safety. The focus is to inspire “safety in the moment” by more effectively managing safeguards during higher-risk work, building and validating the safety capacity of our workforce, and driving effective safety engagement. This particular effort is tailored to different segments of our contractor workforce.
Life saving rules and actions
ExxonMobil employees and contractors work cooperatively to execute the Life Saving Rules & Actions (LSRA) program for routine work activities that have higher risk elements. LSRA execution is important to us because industry experience has demonstrated tragic personnel safety outcomes can occur in certain routine activities.
We continue to enhance our LSRA program for higher-risk work activities, such as confined space entry, hot work, and working at heights. We strive to work with employees and contractors to improve understanding of LSRAs for these higher-risk activities and verify that safeguards are in place throughout the process.
Figure 1: Integrating the Human Performance (HP) Model
Note: ExxonMobil’s HP Approach uses a five-part model intended to move the organization to a mature state where HP concepts and principles are integrated into OIMS and the normal way of doing business
Human performance
As part of our regular health and safety program, we have expanded human performance concepts into our operations, including new human performance fluency training. ExxonMobil’s human performance approach leverages principles and concepts aimed to produce better business results by enhancing our resilience and focusing on learning and improvement. See Figure 1 for illustration.
Culture of Health
To improve the health, quality of life and productivity of employees, ExxonMobil provides a comprehensive Culture of Health (CoH) program. This program provides an environment and resources that actively and consistently promote healthy and safe behaviors. This includes, but is not limited to, encouraging biometric screening, periodic health surveys, access to wellbeing champions, and resources to help employees with resiliency.
Training
Our global training system delivers safety, health, and security training to employees. This training system is role-based, which assigns the required training to the right people to build competencies based on their job roles. Once training is assigned, the progress and completion is stewarded, including refresher training. Appropriate training materials are extended to embedded contractors within our business lines. ExxonMobil specific training requirements are also shared with other parties if these training courses are required for them to perform contracted services within our facilities. Non-operated joint ventures also have access to our training materials if they have written agreements with ExxonMobil.
Performance
For 29 years, ExxonMobil’s Operations Integrity Management System (OIMS) has maintained worldwide expectations for addressing risks inherent to our business, including safety risks. Through this disciplined approach, we continue to realize improved personnel safety performance.
The ExxonMobil OIMS process meets the requirements of the ISO 14001/45001 standards as annually certified/attested by Lloyds Register Quality Assurance. The ISO management system helps us further manage potential environmental impacts, fulfill compliance obligations and identify opportunities for improvement.
We track injuries and illnesses for both employees and contractors, including fatalities, fatal incident rate, lost time incident rate, and total recordable incident rate. This safety performance can be found in our Sustainability Performance Data Table. Unfortunately in 2021, while performing a break out activity on a drill tail stem during push reaming horizontal directional drilling, a contractor was fatally struck by a wrench when the drill pipe unexpectedly rotated. The investigation into this event identified learnings to consider, including standards for managing simultaneous operations associated with break out activities.
From a Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) perspective, our workforce remains the safest among our industry peers, according to industry benchmarks2. As noted above, in 2021, we maintained best-ever results with a LTIR of 0.02 per 200,000 work hours. We have a 2022 plan to build on our industry-leading position in this metric.
FOOTNOTES
1 Using the latest set of ExxonMobil full-year 2021 performance data as of January 12, 2022. ExxonMobil workforce includes employees and contractors. Performance data may include rounding.
2 Industry benchmark: American Petroleum Institute (API) discontinued the Survey of Occupational Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities (OIl) for all segments, except Midstream Pipelines and Terminals, effective January 1, 2021. The International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) safety performance indicators and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) Report of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses are the Upstream and Downstream industry benchmarks, respectively. IOGP safety performance indicators data converted from incidents per 1,000,000 work hours to incidents per 200,000 work hours. 2021 industry data not available at time of publication. Performance data may include rounding. ExxonMobil analysis of data published by API, AFPM, and IOGP.