In a high-stakes industrial environment, safety is no longer just a requirement, it is a powerful test of leadership, trust and a plant’s ability to protect its people amid relentless change.
Safety insights
- Safety is presented as a strategic, risk-reduction function that depends on strong communication, trust, knowledge retention and high-quality procedures rather than compliance alone.
- Safety also emerges as a continuous improvement effort, requiring plants to address human factors, prevent complacency and adapt systems and training to increasingly complex operating environments.
Safety at industrial and manufacturing facilities is an ongoing challenge. Drake Fernandez, Environmental Compliance Specialist at CITGO Petroleum Corp., Houston, emphasizes that best-in-class plant safety is shifting beyond compliance toward a risk-based culture built on trust, communication, knowledge retention and stronger procedures as facilities become more complex and workforces change.
Drake Fernandez is a health, safety, security and environmental professional who helps close gaps and increase robustness in compliance and risk reduction programs, while building trust with key stakeholders. Read this Q&A for insights.
How are plant safety priorities evolving as facilities face changing workforce demographics, tighter regulations and more complex operating environments?
The priority in safety is always the same — to reduce risk. The way we accomplish this is what has been evolving as the workforce skews younger, regulations become stricter and our facilities become more advanced. Communication, which has always been important, has been brought to the forefront in recent years as the rate of change in all facets of our industry seems to only be increasing. Keeping everyone informed of how to work safely, what considerations to make and why, has never been more important. The more time leadership and the more health, safety, security and environment experts can spend in the field, communicating with the workforce, the better.
What are the most significant safety risks industrial facilities may still be underestimating?
As facilities age and the tenured workforce retires, problems with cascading consequences can begin to occur in old systems where knowledge has been lost. It is important to identify this and capture or recreate this knowledge whenever possible. Bringing in a team to comb through your facility and update diagrams or processes may be expensive, but not having accurate information can be even more so.
How should plants approach safety as a broader operational strategy rather than as a compliance exercise alone?
A safety program is most effective when it is recognized as a core component of business success, instead of just a compliance obligation. Effort and money thoughtfully spent emphasizing safety and working to consistently improve the program is a value multiplier. It will catapult an organization to higher levels of efficiency. This is most simply accomplished by shifting the focus of a safety program from “How can we comply with the regulations?” to “How can we reduce risk?”
What role does human factors engineering (HFE) play in improving safety outcomes in industrial environments?
HFE plays a large role in safety outcomes in industrial environments. Tasks that involve repetitive motion are where we have seen the most impact in implementing ergonomics improvements. This is an area of constant innovation and improvement. As new technology becomes available, that can potentially reduce risk to workers it is considered and trialed on site if it seems like a good fit.
Where are you seeing the greatest opportunities to reduce incident risk through better training, procedures and system design?
The greatest opportunity I see in this area is to increase the quality of procedures. A procedure should be your instruction manual for a job and walk you through exactly what steps to take to safely accomplish it. This type of detailed documentation is time and resource intensive to create and maintain, but it can significantly improve safety outcomes while also helping to identify process inconsistencies. Excellence in this area requires a strong management of change process and consistent attention but is well worth the investment and is something we are always working to improve.
How are leading facilities improving safety culture and what practical steps can plant leaders take to build stronger engagement from frontline workers?
Improving safety culture starts with improving trust. A good safety culture will never develop if frontline workers are not comfortable bringing concerns, near misses and incidents to their leadership for fear of retribution. Plant leadership must react to these items in a thoughtful way, share the decision-making process and the reason for the decisions that are made.
Engagement can be built by following up with workers to show them that their concerns and ideas are being addressed. We have seen success implementing a good catch dashboard, shown on screens throughout the facility, that displays good catches brought up by workers and what actions are being taken to address them.
What safety-related challenges are becoming more prominent as plants adopt more connected, automated and digitally enabled systems?
As systems become more advanced, they generally make jobs less intensive and sometimes less engaging. This is usually a net positive, but it can allow for complacency to develop where it would not have before and complacency is an enemy to safety.
Looking forward, what do you believe will define best-in-class industrial safety programs over the next several years?
Best-in-class programs will focus on building trust throughout the organization, improving communication from the factory floor to leadership and making meaningful changes in response to incidents and near misses. These are the basics for a reason and I don’t think they are going anywhere anytime soon.
