4 minute read
A HUMANISTIC APPROACH TO SAFETY
by PHI
By: Robert Bouillion, Vice President of HSEQ – PHI Aviation
At PHI, we know that it’s not enough to get the job done—it’s about getting the job done safely.
As one of our core values, safety is embedded throughout our organization. Our teams know that the safety of our people, our passengers and the community is paramount to our flight and business operations, and building and sustaining our industry-leading safety performance requires deliberate actions to reduce exposure to risk. From line-level teams to senior leaders, it’s our collective commitment to safety that shapes our decision-making every day, at every level.
Over the last few decades, PHI has introduced several key initiatives to transform our culture and enable continuous improvement of our safety management systems and compliance programs. It’s these practices that have provided our teams with resilience in challenging times. With more than 70 years of experience, our safety culture and management procedures have evolved into a systematic approach where employees are committed, engaged and empowered. Our formal safety management system (SMS) has provided a robust set of policies, practices and procedures to assist us in managing safety-critical activities. Over the years we have realized that those systems that fully recognize and manage human factors are most effective.
As a result, and in an effort to create a sustainable path to ensuring that human factors remain at the forefront of PHI’s safety management efforts, we incorporated a fifth pillar into our SMS in 2019: the Human Dimension of Safety. The Human Dimension helps us reinforce a humanistic approach to safety and highlights the influence of the interaction of people, processes and technology on safety performance.
Our people are what make the work we do here at PHI possible, so it’s only fitting that we recognize human performance as one of the most critical aspects of safety and outline processes and procedures aimed at strengthening the mental, social and physiological well-being of all employees. This pillar focused on human factors is embedded at the heart of our Safety Management System.
Every day, our frontline teams are facing and responsible for managing risks. The Human Dimension of Safety component of our SMS is designed to focus on key elements associated with human factors, taking into consideration the fact that the mental, social and physiological wellbeing of each employee plays a critical role in the effectiveness of our SMS and our resulting safety performance.
Regarding safety performance, PHI believes that:
- Humans make mistakes
- Consequences of human errors can be managed
- Technology, management systems and a leadership-driven culture can mitigate significant consequences of human error
- A systematic approach must be applied to manage and minimize operational risks
PHI’s high standards are hinged on our core values and the expectations we have set. A clear vision set by programs such as Destination Zero and an active safety management system, cultivate a safety culture that creates operational excellence through deliberate actions. Consistent with a humanistic approach to safety, our goal is to ensure that each and every PHI employee is empowered to Stand Up, Speak Out and Take Action. It is critical that we work towards optimizing the mental, social and physiological wellbeing of all employees in order for them to maintain focus on daily job tasks without undue stress, anxiety, tension or fatigue. It’s important for each of us to remember that success starts with leadership—not as a position, but as a set of actions. PHI’s culture is critical in this aspect of safety performance in that it’s most effective when demonstrated in the actions of leaders at every level within an organization. Continued emphasis on the Human Dimension of Safety will improve our ability to strengthen our resilience and maintain industry-leading safety performance.
Maintaining a positive safety culture here at PHI is essential to providing social influences that drive continuous safety improvements. As part of these efforts, PHI is renewing our commitment to the key safety initiatives that have helped define our culture and solidify our position as an industry leader in safety. Over the next few months, our teams around the globe will engage and share a series of videos and resources to help all employees gain a better understanding of our commitment to safety and how each of us play a key role in the ongoing success of our initiatives. We can all benefit from strengthening our understanding of the key safety programs that drive our safety efforts. We look forward to these engagements and the valuable input you’ll provide to assist us in strengthening our overall risk management process.
