The Human Factor in Process Safety

The Human Factor in Process Safety

Wellbeing as operational intelligence for offshore and onshore operations. We measure the conditions your crews work under. We fix systems, not people.

Day Fourteen of the Rotation

Most incidents on an asset do not start with hardware. They start with people running on empty. Behind the dropped objects, the permit breaches and the process upsets sit fatigue, cognitive overload, stress and thin handovers. These are system risks, produced by rotation length, shared cabins, noise, connectivity and the way leadership behaves offshore and onshore.

A fatigue risk management system can be fully compliant while the control room operator on night fourteen has not slept properly in a week.

The absorber of system failure, almost always, is a person.

Driler and offsider on a reverse-circulation drilling rig on a mine site drilling for minerals

MOST INCIDENTS TRACE TO CONDITIONS, NOT CARELESSNESS

WHAT YOUR SYSTEM DOESN’T SEE

Stress

Fatigue

Error

RECORDING STARTS HERE

WHAT IT RECORDS

Incident

Shutdown

Lost production

Cost

By the time a condition reaches the part of the chain your reporting measures, three stages have already happened and nobody counted them.

MOST INCIDENTS TRACE TO CONDITIONS, NOT CARELESSNESS

WHAT YOUR SYSTEM DOESN’T SEE

Stress

Fatigue

Error

RECORDING STARTS HERE

WHAT IT RECORDS

Incident

Shutdown

Lost production

Cost

By the time a condition reaches the part of the chain your reporting measures, three stages have already happened and nobody counted them.

Both Happened While the Numbers Were Improving

Texas City in 2005. Macondo in 2010. Two of the worst days this industry has had, and the recordable rates at both were trending down beforehand. That is not a coincidence or bad luck. It is what happens when an organisation measures the thing that is easy to count rather than the thing that decides what happens next.


Across seventeen years of OSHA data and 3.2 trillion worker hours, recordable rates show no correlation with fatality rates. Between 96 and 98 per cent of the variation in a typical rate is statistical noise. A low recordable count tells you what has not happened yet. It does not tell you whether your barriers are holding.

96 to 98%

of the variation in a typical recordable rate is statistical noise, not a change in safety

Hallowell et al., Construction Safety Research Alliance, 2020

NO LINK

between total recordable incident rates and fatality rates, across seventeen years of OSHA data and 3.2 trillion worker hours

Oil production platform while flaring off and helicopter departing

The Human Element Is Already in Your Assurance Framework

Human factors are not a new agenda in this industry. They are in the safety case, the bowtie, the fatigue risk management system and the process safety management framework. What is missing from most of them is any measurement of the condition the human barrier is actually in.


ISO 45003 sets the management standard for psychosocial risk, and auditors increasingly reference it.

API RP 755 covers fatigue risk management for personnel in refining and petrochemicals, and came out of the work that followed Texas City.

IOGP reports human factors among the leading contributors to high-consequence events in its annual safety performance indicators. Barrier and bowtie models assume every barrier is verified, and the human barrier is the one almost nobody verifies the condition of. Contractor assurance increasingly reaches into workforce welfare, and a large share of your headcount is contractors.

We measure the conditions that produce outcomes, not just the outcomes after the fact.

Roughnecks running casing on the rif floor wearing full PPE

We measure

Your OPERATION, One Page

Your OPERATION, One Page

We measure seven dimensions of individual wellbeing, three short clinical screens, capacity to change, and Life on Site, which is breaks between shifts, the drive from the heliport, sleep in a shared cabin, contact home, food, exercise and support. Results aggregate at safe group sizes and come back as a results pack and an expert debrief. Not a dashboard login nobody opens. A document your leadership team can read in twenty minutes and act on.

What arrives after round one

Sample operation results pack overview page showing the Oil & Gas Wellbeing Index, band spread, seven dimensions and Life on Site hotspots

Wellbeing Index and Life on Site scored and banded, how your workforce is spread across the five bands, all seven dimensions averaged across the operation, the clinical screens as a share of workforce, and the Life on Site hotspots ranked.

Sample site results pack page splitting scores by department, rank and time on contract, with three ninety-day priorities

The same scores split by work location, rotation and employer, so you can see that sleep on an FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading vessel) is 41 against 52 onshore, or where contractors sit against the operator's own people. Ends with three priorities for the next ninety days, each with an owner and a timeframe.

41

Sleep on floating facilities, against 52 onshore. Shared cabins, noise and vibration are the usual causes.

1 in 4

Report high loneliness, highest on offshore rotation, where contact with home depends on connectivity and the length of the rotation.

34%

Share who do not know where to get confidential support. The cheapest gap to close, and the one that matters most when you are offshore.

What You See, and What You Never See

Sample results table with three ranks scored and the pipeline or terminal row withheld because fewer than five responded

Four people at pipelines and terminals responded. Their row is not shown.

You see results by work location, rotation, employer and time on site. You never see an individual's answers or score, and no group smaller than five is ever shown. That is not a setting. It is how the reporting is built.


The clinical screens work the same way. You see that thirteen per cent screened positive for depression. You never see who. Everyone who screened positive got your employee assistance programme and medic contacts in their own private report.

Screens are not diagnoses.

Example data · In development

The platform, in development

The Wellbeing Daily Intelligence platform will carry this live, alongside the Six Drivers organisational diagnostic, with results by asset and trend lines across rotations. It is in development now, being built with founding operators.

Example Wellbeing Daily Intelligence dashboard, in development, showing segment results by vessel and themes from crew responses
Example Wellbeing Daily Intelligence dashboard, in development, showing segment results by vessel and themes from crew responses

How it runs

01

Everyone takes the assessment

02

Results grouped safely

03

Site results pack

04

Expert debrief

05

Re-measure, if you want it

The debrief is where findings become decisions, with the people who own them. Employees and contractors each get a confidential personal report, and nothing is shown for fewer than five people.

OIL & GAS Wellbeing Self-Assessment

Seven dimensions, clinical screens and Life on Site, completed by each person, aggregated anonymously. For HSE and HR who need visibility without surveillance.

Six Drivers Diagnostic

The six system conditions scored across assets and the office. For senior leadership who need to know where to act first.

Psychosocial Risk Assessment

A clause-by-clause review against ISO 45003, producing a risk register and hazard-to-control matrix. For audit, regulator and board reporting.

The Capacity Index

A composite measure of an operation's ability to absorb variability and recover from failure. For leaders who want a forward-looking alternative to TRIFR.

Take the Six-Minute Check Your Crews Would Take

Take the Six-Minute Check Your Crews Would Take

The Oil and Gas Wellbeing Mini is 24 questions from the full assessment: sleep, pressure, work, connection, life satisfaction and life on site, offshore or onshore. Results appear on screen the moment you finish, and nothing is shared with your company.

24 Questions

About Six Minutes

Results on Screen

Confidential

If you are an OIM or Rig Manager, an executive, or work in HR, HSE or wellbeing, you can then take the full Oil and Gas Wellbeing Self-Assessment free and see both halves: the private report your crews receive, and the results pack you would be working from.

Your results, on screen

Sample

58 / 100

SURVIVING

Sleep

50

Handling pressure

62

Work

55

Connection

70

Life satisfaction

53

Life on Site

46

Every result ends with where to look first and how to get confidential support.

Oil refinery at night time

We educate · Human and Organisational Performance

Your Last Barrier Is a Person

Every bowtie on your asset assumes its barriers are verified. Hardware barriers get tested, inspected and certified on a schedule. The human barrier gets a toolbox talk. Human and Organisational Performance is how the human element stops being a training topic and becomes a managed system with a condition you can actually check.

Fisher Improvement Technologies logo

Delivered under licence from Fisher Improvement Technologies

Wellbeing Daily is a certified FIT partner, licensed to deliver FIT’s full catalogue under our own brand, not a subset of it. That covers human performance, human factors, incident analysis, learning teams, and procedure and process excellence. Ian Collins delivers it as a certified FIT consultant, and Rob Fisher, who founded FIT, wrote the foreword to The Wellbeing Imperative.

Deployment, not a workshop

A two-day course changes what people know for about a fortnight. What changes an asset is deployment: the programme runs into the systems you already have, and the people who run them keep running them afterwards.

Leaders who respond differently to error

How an OIM or a supervisor reacts to a mistake decides whether the next one is surfaced or buried. That is the single highest-leverage change available, and it is a trainable behaviour.

Learning teams on live problems

Not a classroom exercise. A crew working an actual operational problem, with the conditions written down and owned.

Incident analysis that changes conditions

Redesigned around what made the error likely rather than who made it, and structured so the output strengthens the barriers your safety case already relies on.

How it reaches aN OPERATION

On the asset

delivered offshore or on site, scheduled around crew change

Live online

for onshore teams and mixed cohorts

Self-paced

Through our learning platform

White-label

As SCORM for the LMS your fleet already runs

Train-the-trainer

Your own people qualified to deliver it in house

Who it’s for: OIMs, supervisors, superintendents, and HSE and operations leadership onshore. The programme assumes an audience that has worked a rotation.

Blame ends the learning. Conditions start it. Every incident analysis strengthens the critical controls your board already reports on.

Tools That Reach the Asset

Digital tools · Early access

OIL & GAS wellbeing app, offline-first

Daily habits, learning, sleep and stress tracking, and self-assessment. Built offline-first for assets where connectivity is limited and bandwidth is rationed, synchronising when it returns. In live demonstration now, ready to roll out with founding operators.

Always on · In development

AI wellbeing coaching

Personalised guidance between sessions. Being built into the app now, with founding operators shaping how it works offshore.




People

Executive and team coaching

One-to-one coaching for asset and corporate leaders, plus team coaching for frontline supervisors.


Continuity

Reporting and ongoing support

Secure dashboards for HSE, operations and HR alongside your safety reporting, structured review, and re-diagnosis at twelve and twenty-four months.

Built with the industry, not for it

The app is in live demonstration today. We are onboarding a limited number of founding operators whose crews shape the roadmap and who hold preferential terms for the life of the product. Ask to see it running.

Semi-submersible drilling rig out in the middle of the ocean

Built for the Realities of Oil and Gas

The deepest expertise sits where rotation, remote assets and a contractor-heavy workforce make psychosocial risk hardest to see. Joint ownership across HSE, operations and HR delivers the strongest results.

Founded on published expertise. Ian Collins, author of The Wellbeing Imperative (Penguin Random House, 2026), with fifteen years consulting across high-risk operations, and a number of years offshore on deck and drill crews prior to that.

Offshore Production

Drilling & Wells

Refining & Petrochemicals

LNG & Gas Processing

Pipelines & Terminals

Contractors & Service Companies

The Full OIL & GAS Overview

A twelve-page overview of how we work with offshore and onshore operations. The evidence base, the frameworks, the instruments, the programmes for the asset and the office, and the engagement path with real timelines.

Wellbeing Daily Oil & Gas Overview 2026 cover outlining our services for the oil & gas industry

ON THE WELLBEING IMPERATIVE

"The environment we create for

people is not something separate from the work. It is what makes

the work happen reliably."

José Almeida, Head Corporate Safety and Security, Galp

"Wellbeing should not be seen as a soft HR topic, but as a core operational and safety discipline. If we want resilient operations, stronger safety cultures, and better decision-making under pressure, we need to understand and manage the human conditions that sit

behind performance.."

Carsten Sonne-Schmidt, former CFO at Maersk Oil

"Having seen these principles applied in real organizations, I can attest that wellbeing is not separate from performance, it is the

foundation of it. The leaders who invest in the wellbeing of their people are not lowering the bar; they are creating the conditions for sustainable excellence. This book offers a practical roadmap for that journey."

David Osteen, former Road Transportation Manager, Fortune 100 Energy Company

Count, or Build.

Count, or Build.

Every operation chooses, every day, which system it is running. One reacts, complies and survives. The other anticipates, adapts and absorbs surprise without breaking. The difference is capacity, and capacity can be measured.

Every operation chooses, every day, which system it is running. One reacts, complies and survives. The other anticipates, adapts and absorbs surprise without breaking. The difference is capacity, and capacity can be measured.

Cover of The Wellbeing Imperative by Ian Collins