Essential Safety Tips Your Business Should Do Before Drilling for Oil and Gas

The oil and gas industry faces many challenges when it comes to safety. It is a working environment that is extremely high risk as various accidents may take place. The high risk comes from powerful equipment, flammable chemicals, and other factors that can cause hazardous accidents, and sometimes fatal ones. That’s why many oil and gas companies emphasize practicing the best safety measures to ensure that their workers and the job are not in danger.

All processes must be firmly assessed by safety professionals to guarantee the safety of workers. Here are some essential safety tips that your business should implement before starting drilling.

Establish a Safety-first Mindset

Establishing a safety-first mindset doesn’t come from telling workers what to do and what not to do. Instead, it should be instilled in workers, supervisors, and managers to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Managers should consistently remind employees and subcontractors of the importance of keeping safety measures a priority. You should encourage them to follow safety rules and regulations while staying alert to possible hazards. Ensuring that your management follows the safety rules will automatically make the workers follow the same rules.

Maintain Basic Safety Measures

Adhering to small and basic safety measures will make workers pay more attention to bigger hazards and how to prevent them. Maintaining good housekeeping to prevent any falls, slips, and trips will prevent minor accidents while instilling the mindset of prioritizing safety. Other basic safety measures to follow are:

• Clearing walkways from any tools or debris.
• Cleaning spills immediately.
• Wearing protective gear and establishing safe work practices.

Continuous Learning

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, the key to grow and thrive is to keep learning and improving your business. The oil and gas industry is always open to new techniques, practices, and innovations to learn and apply. Business managers should always know the best practices for how to operate efficiently, how to file a lien if the contractor didn’t pay what they are due, safety measures, and every possible way to improve the industry. When it comes to safety measures, the business should engage in goal setting regulatory framework with the industry and the trade unions through workshops, seminars, and publications.

Conduct Orientation

Before allowing any new or transferred employees to operate in a new location or with machinery, they must go through an orientation session to inform them of every safety measure practiced regarding their tasks. This orientation will help employees and contractors to know the operational policies, expectations, and rules of the company, which will result in a safer work environment.

Train Workers

Training your workers on safety measures is not a one-time thing, as newer and more efficient practices are developed regularly. No matter how much experience your workers have, you should conduct safety training sessions to either remind them of the safety measures or to update their knowledge. Newer machinery and equipment require different practices to handle them safely, and every worker should be trained on how to operate them safely. Additionally, it instills the mindset of safety-first as the workers see how committed the management is to safety.

Get to the Root of Any Issue

Resolving any issue regarding work hazards whether it was minor or major is easy to do but the important thing is to learn from it. Instead of looking for a quick fix, the company must understand the deep underlying causes of any problem to ensure its workers have a safe work environment. Understanding the root of the problem will aid the company in developing better safety regulations and rules to apply and train the workers on, instead of just curing the symptoms of the problem.

Implement an Effective Reporting Process

It is essential that the workers have a reporting process that they trust and know will change their working conditions for the better. The process should reward workers for reporting potential hazards instead of reacting negatively to their comments. The work must stop to deal with the potential hazard to cement the safety-first mindset in their work culture even if it is not ideal to stop the work.

Human life must come first and losing a worker damages the worker and the company. Having too many accidents on the job site may lead the other party to refuse to pay the company’s fees. The safety measures don’t only protect your workers, but also protect your business and its reputation. The important thing is to take safety regulations and rules seriously and ensure that the managers follow these measures to inspire the workers.