Putting Energy into a Company Culture that Keeps Workers Safe

For Renee Linssen, Director of EHS (Environment, Health, and Safety) at ClearStream Energy Services, just learning from a workplace incident is not enough. Accidents commonly lead to injuries, from physical and psychological to environmental damage and loss of public confidence. That’s why Linssen’s constant focus is on preventing incidents from occurring in the first place.

Linssen, who has a career spanning more than thirty years in health and safety, has a lifelong passion for keeping people safe. Since accepting the director’s role in November 2016, he has taken a proactive approach to worker health at ClearStream, which provides solutions for the Canadian energy and industrial markets.

With his guidance and experience, the company puts a strong emphasis on ensuring workers and supervisors have the skills, knowledge, and abilities to perform their tasks safely. Leadership is engaged in validating the importance of sound worker habits, with CEO Yves Paletta regularly putting on his work boots and talking with frontline workers about safe practices. According to Linssen, care is built into all aspects of the organization and every project. “Safety needs to be at the table right from the start of any project. It needs to be part of the planning process.”

As a culture of safety permeates every aspect of the company, employees have a heightened awareness of any unsafe activity. Instead of just one safety person at each site, there are now a hundred sets of eyes focused on preventing incidents and injuries.

Part of being proactive is understanding where risks exist. ClearStream tracks leading incident indicators around near misses, behavior operations, and worksite hazards that can help Linssen and his team identify trends and mitigate potential incidents.

“We switched our focus from TRIF [total recordable incident frequency] to leading incident indicators,” Linssen said. “TRIF tracks accidents that have happened—and that, ultimately, you can’t do much about. You can communicate this and try to prevent it from happening again, but what’s happened has happened. When you focus on being proactive, you can implement strategies to stop the incidents from happening altogether.”

However, managing the recording of those indicators was challenging and time-consuming. Staff in the field would track data on paper and submit the results to a single safety professional who manually entered the information into a database.

Linssen transformed the company’s approach to HSE by finding a better way to record those indicators using ComplianceQuest, a 100% modern enterprise quality and safety management system (QHSE) natively built and run on the Salesforce platform.

“ComplianceQuest has removed the administrative dependency on managing our leading indicators,” Linssen said. “That gets our safety people back out into the field faster. Ultimately, we’re best served if our safety professionals are actively engaged in the workforce where they can intervene in unsafe behavior before it becomes an incident.”

As a result, safety staff can record indicators on-site in real-time, instantly identify behaviors that need to change, and bring them directly to clients and frontline workers. When an issue is found at a work site, safety officers talk to workers then and there to better understand why they’re engaging in unsafe behaviors. The EHS team can then help to encourage positive change in employees’ behaviors and attitudes when it comes to working safely.

By intervening in the field before an accident happens, safety professionals can significantly increase the odds of everybody going home to their family at the end of the day. For Linssen, every day that happens is a great day.

About ComplianceQuest

ComplianceQuest is the fastest growing, 100% modern cloud Next Generation Enterprise Quality and Safety Management System (QHSE) natively built and run on the Salesforce platform. Our unified Next Generation QHSE solutions help our customers of all sizes deliver quality products and services in the safest, most sustainable way by mitigating risk, problems, and inefficiencies while protecting customers, employees, suppliers and brand.

For more information, or to request a demo with a ComplianceQuest expert, contact ComplianceQuest today by sending and email to marketing@compliancequest.com.