Advancing safety performance

Attendees at the recent Safety Delta Annual Meeting engaged in various talks to advance safety performance through Safety Delta.

The Safety Delta Annual Meeting held last January 27th centered on identifying improvement opportunities, maximising Safety Delta features and resources, and sharing good stories and experiences to advance safety performance.

Below are some of the key points and development actions discussed in the meeting:

In an interview, Richard Chavez shared his experiences about Ultraship’s journey towards elevated engagement between ship and shore. It all started when the company recognised the need to assign specific office personnel to spearhead Safety Delta activities within the company. Since Richard was tapped to be a Safety Delta key driver at Ultraship, he has tried several dialogue setups to encourage open and trusting communication with the crew members. He highlighted two important things to ensure effective ship-shore dialogue and collaboration: a clear understanding of the Safety Delta philosophy and building trust with the crew.

As shown above, captains from various companies agree that office staff engagement plays a vital role in the Safety Delta cycles. Help your office staff support Safety Delta on board. In a separate issue of Among Us, we will go into more details from the interview with Richard Chavez and the discussion points it raised.

We also discussed how the Building blocks feature, which allows clients to pick specific safety areas for the cycle, was used with great effect by LSC in 2021. Vessel masters and shore staff at LSC appreciated Building blocks as it addresses priority areas, while the crew also favoured the variety in the questionnaire, and the shorter surveys and reports.

Safety Delta Building blocks allowed LSC to focus on concern areas in different cycles.

A free sharing of ideas about how to further improve Safety Delta yielded these inputs:

a. Diagnosis

• Some crew members provide “correct” answers instead of true and honest ones because they view Safety Delta as a benchmarking or appraisal tool. The client companies recognise their role in conveying to their crew members the importance of providing honest answers to the survey.

• The new report format that shows differences in rank scores provides useful information. One improvement could be to add the legend section to all pages of the report.

The legend section could be added to all pages instead of just on the first detailed report.

b. Dialogue

• Breaking the “line management thinking” remains a challenge as it is new to the crew to do so and express own opinion. Using the SDLL tools such as the dialogue sheets can help.

• Also, not all vessel managers can confidently facilitate the ship-shore dialogue on their own. It requires more knowledge about how to engage the crew. It could be useful for the office staff to attend Safety Delta familiarisation webinars to refresh the fundamentals of the concept.

c. Development

• Safety Delta animations are helpful during on-board trainings. And to provide the crew with more hands-on training, activities could include practical tasks on site.

• Client companies request for more soft skill subjects to match OCIMF guidelines. The Safety Delta team assured them that new subjects aligned with the TMSA human factor are already being developed.

In the last portion of the meeting, the Safety Delta team shared relevant crew engagement stories. Finally, tanker companies agreed to collaborate further about how Safety Delta can be aligned with new requirements under the OCIMF guidelines.

Thank you to all Safety Delta Annual Meeting attendees for the insightful collaborations. Here’s to more #SafetyDeltaMoments.

If you want to include Safety Delta news in your company newsletters or bulletins, you may send us an e-mail so we can assist you.

You may also download the PDF version and share it with your crew, or have it posted on your bulletin boards:

DOWNLOAD PRINTABLE PDF COPY OF THIS ISSUE