Tyrone Kalpee - VP of Business Transformation | Atlantic

It is an absolute honour for Atlantic to serve again as the title sponsor of this year’s AMCHAM HSSE Conference. For over a decade, Atlantic has proudly supported this event, demonstrating our commitment to the learning and growth that must occur if we must improve our HSSE performance, individually and collectively.

And there has been so much growth through the lifetime of this Conference - firstly as evidenced by the great examples we saw at the HSSE Awards last night, especially with the increased representation of companies across multi-sectors – large and those who are still growing - all of whom are becoming exemplars for others. We celebrate all of you and your journeys. 

But the growth over these years has been visible in another way – early Conference themes were related to compliance with new HSE legislation, HSSE standards, building management systems, organizational resilience and managing risks, including the most recent on the energy transition. These have all deepened our knowledge, challenged industry assumptions, and collaboratively shaped the future of safe work delivery. They have been excellent enablers. 

Through these changes, the greatest acknowledgement of growth is where we have come to today with the focus of this conference –we may call it ‘Human Factors ‘ or ‘ Psychological Safety’ or ‘Human and Organizational Performance’ in their deepest technical terms, but the underlying focus is rightfully on people …but not just people – OUR people. 
Across our companies, our working environments are complex, with many rules, policies, assessments and systems that guide the ‘what’ that needs to be done, and these undoubtedly are cornerstones of our HSSE performance. 

They only drive excellence, however, when we spend time understanding how our people interact with them, and, more importantly ‘why’ they may not. Understanding ‘why’ may be more important that retraining on the ‘what’. Which we often do in response to an incident.
This conference allows us to have a different perspective – to look at ourselves, as leaders or practitioners, that despite our good intent… there is a lot to learn about our interactions and behaviours…we may have to listen differently and to also seek to understand,  a primary objective. 

We must also assume that sometimes over time, our organizations may have created well-intentioned complexity, which may not be fit for purpose and can lead to errors, especially if sometimes human conditions and pressures reveal themselves, and then things can go seriously wrong. 

At Atlantic, we are also on this journey and we far from perfect. We are, however, very committed to learning and continuously improving this interaction with our teams and contracted workforce. 

Yes, we have many HSSE KPIs that we review on an ongoing basis, but we have found that the most impactful time we spend as leaders is in our monthly safety leadership meetings led by our CEO. 

This is where we put the KPIs aside for 70 minutes, and all our leadership team members, managers and senior operations personnel reflect on the shadow we cast as leaders, how are really listening,  we also create a safe space to discuss our own feelings – our stresses, workloads…as it starts with us …and if we are not careful, those can be transferred to our teams, with less than positive outcomes. We understand that we too are human. 

We also discuss what we observe when we visit our work site and see how work is really conducted– work imagined versus work done - like our many paged detailed risk assessments that may be overwhelming for a work crew actually conducting work in the field, or that the sun is now more of a risk in extended work hours; that long travel hours add up to fatigue during our Turnarounds, that our performing authorities controlling work on our site can only provide oversight over a limited number of jobs. 

All of these are simple and maybe obvious examples but they are real to those who face them.…but the related interventions provide powerful examples of care.

We continue to engage with our over 600- 800 contractor workforce every month to see if we are getting it right, and how we can improve. Every month we try to speak less and engage more. We also engage with their leaders as we look for partnership on this journey. 
We have learnt that if our workforce feels uncertain, disrespected or unsupported, we can create the environment for error when work is conducted, so our effort is for teams to feel heard, respected and valued, as over time trust is built and they are far more likely to speak up to share concerns. But we know that this has to be earned through our own leadership behaviours, and takes time.

So, at Atlantic, safety as a value is underpinned in our Atlantic Way, which has been built with feedback from our employees and contracted workforce. It is the way we care, what we recognize as the right behaviours, the way we enable doing the right thing, and making it okay to say that we got it wrong …starting with the highest levels of leadership. These together help us also drive accountability and performance – but they must be in the right order. 

By truly listening, leading with empathy, and building a culture of trust, we are trying everyday to transform HSSE from a set of rules into a shared, lived priority. We believe that this may be a longer road to travel, but one in which we build sustainable engagement, empowerment and ownership of our HSSE performance.

Our Atlantic journey has to be a shared one, as the wider industry in Trinidad and Tobago is largely a shared workforce. This conference brings that out clearly as you look around the room. 

There is no competition on which company is safer – the awards last night celebrated effort on a journey – not ranking, though others may disagree judging by the celebrations last night. 

We must feel an equal sorrow when we see someone seriously injured anywhere – a shared accountability of sorts. So, this focus on people has to be shared across our companies or will not be successful.

This is why we are excited to see this Conference continue to grow in participation as well as the nature of the content over the next two days, and we congratulate the Amcham HSSE Committee and the Board of Amcham for creating this shared space of learning. 

In closing, a reminder to us on this journey, that empowering speaking up, though painful at times, is at the cornerstone of a mature safety culture, as it provides us with the knowledge of the things that can go wrong and the parts of our system that will fail …long before they actually do … …. and sadly, the only other time to find out about these weaknesses is after an incident investigation, and then we call them causal or system learnings. Learning from injuries is the choice that none of us wants.  

I thank you.