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SAFETYAT

HEARTWood Group PSN invests in the development of future workersBY: KATIE CARMICHAEL

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most important equipment. Located behind the building is a fully simulated production facility pad, with a mock tank battery and associated equipment and instrumentation, as well as an area with buried pipe for pipeline locating.

As for those who are here for more than just day training, a 235-bed lodge awaits at the back of the property, stocked with all the amenities to make these temporary quarters a comfortable home away from home.

The project is the brainchild of Wood Group PSN Americas’ co-presidents John Glithero and Mitch Fralick, who quickly recognized the need for such infrastructure in the once quiet South Texas region. “When we started working down here, we had to find places to meet, and, luckily, the communities were very supportive of us and let us use their different facilities that they had,” Glithero recalls. “But our workforce is so large and our needs had grown to the point where we had to have somewhere a little bit larger and more accommodating, so we decided to make that long-term investment.”

Wood Group PSN was recently acknowl-edged for its efforts in the area, receiving an honorable mention for the 2014 Eagle Ford Excellence Award for Safety Performance from the South Texas Energy & Economic Round-table (STEER).

The tangible need for such a facility may have been the deciding factor, but the brick-and-mortar building is more of a physical representation of many years and roughly a million dollars’ worth of investment in work-force training. “With an aging workforce and the rapidly growing need for quality and skilled people to meet the demand created by the growth of the shale industry, the writing has been on the wall for the past 10 years that we, as a service provider, were going to have to in-vest in the development of the future workers,” Fralick explains.

Within these walls, more than 15 years of curriculum development and industry expertise is imparted to a new generation of workers alongside industry veterans. In addition to training new personnel, several courses are offered as “refreshers”, aimed at ensuring all employees have the same level of train-ing and understanding of the stringent safety culture on which Wood Group PSN has built its reputation.

Wood Group PSN operates multiple training networks around the world, geared primarily toward the offshore sector; and the concept of workforce readiness is not exclusive to these facilities. The company is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to connect with the workers of tomorrow.

While safety is the number one core value of Wood Group PSN, relationships are at the heart

of everything this company does, especially with its employees. “If one of our employees moves on to work for a client company, which happens a lot, they can become our customer,” Glithero says. “That’s why we say we treat our employees as best as we can, so they’ll treat us well in the future.”

Investing in the workforce is good for busi-ness and for the industry as a whole, as Wood Group PSN is raising the bar and setting the gold standard for industry safety practices.

The Safety Cocoon is the most recent safety initiative to come out of Wood Group PSN. It’s innovative, yet intentionally simplistic in nature, comprised of four layers focusing on hazard awareness, safety training, behavioural standards and life-saving rules.

The first layer in the cocoon is Aristos, the Greek word for “excellence.” Aristos is a unique training tool created by Wood Group PSN that provides an interactive experience for employees to better un-derstand the real-world implications of everyday decision-making. All employees are expected to complete the one-day training program, which encourages everyone involved with Wood Group PSN to think about their actions both at the workplace and beyond. “You can have the best tools in the world, but if people don’t make the personal decision to use them, you’re not going to get anywhere,” Fralick says. “Aristos is all about people’s behavior and people making the right decision.”

The second layer is Hazard Awareness, which promotes aware-ness of one’s surround-ings and provides tools to help identify unsafe situations before work even begins. These tools help employees work together as a team and as individuals to keep all work zones hazard free.

Life Saving Rules, the next layer of the co-coon, includes nine guidelines that everyone in the organization must follow to ensure safety. Since the rules’ introduction, the company has experienced considerably fewer recordable work incidents. Behavioural Standards, the

Investing in the work-force is good for business and for the industry as a whole, as Wood Group PSN is rais-ing the bar and setting the gold standard for indus-try safety practices

INVESTING INTHE WORKFORCE

THE SAFETY COCOON: INSIDE THE PROTECTIVE

LAYERS

Within the Eagle Ford is Kenedy, Texas, once a tiny dot on the map that is now an epicenter of drilling activity in the shale. Upon arrival in Kenedy, you will notice dozens of big rigs as you pull up to one of several overwhelmed stop signs. You’ll pass drill site after drill site until suddenly the familiar rectangular pads are replaced with a pristine, one-story building. See the multicolored Wood Group logo on a stark white sign in front of a long driveway? It means you’ve reached your destination.

Safety is first and foremost at Wood Group, and this core value is at the heart of its health, safety and environment (HSE) facility located on FM 2102 in Kenedy.

A leading energy service firm, Wood Group has three businesses – Wood Group PSN, Wood Group Kenny and Wood Group Mustang – providing a range of engineering, production support and maintenance management services to the oil and gas, and power generation industries world-wide.

Last March, Wood Group PSN opened a 16,000-square-foot training facility in Kenedy, where educational programs for Eagle Ford Shale workers focus on HSE and technical competency. The center includes a 300-person-capacity training room, an instrumentation and electrical (I&E) lab, a computer-based training (CBT) lab, and a boardroom. Through its decades working with the energy industry, Wood Group has developed extensive expertise and a comprehen-sive curriculum that is passed on through a mix of class-room learning, hands-on experience and CBT.

A quick run-through of one lab reveals just how exten-sive the training is, based solely on the amount of available equipment. One student guides me through the objects, leaving me perplexed: a pressure transmitter, a simulated wellhead, a tank level switch/alarm, gas measurement equipment and so on. The instructor explains that this equipment is identical to what workers will be using out in the field. Within the lab, there are troubleshooting capabili-ties that simulate actual situations a worker might encounter on the job, which allows for solutions-based learning and hands-on problem solving.

Beyond the walls of the facility, however, lie some of the

Driving south on Highway 181, you don’t need a road map or street signs to realize once you’ve entered oil country, or as it is formally known, the Eagle Ford Shale.

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WOOD GROUP HSE TRAINING FACILITY

IN KENEDY, TX

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investment, although the company’s community involvement doesn’t stop at the property line. Wood Group PSN employs on average 1,000 workers in this area alone. The company also has a strong presence in the Permian Basin, employing an additional 2,000 to 3,000 individu-als in the western portion of the state.

Beyond employment, Wood Group PSN and its people go to great lengths to give back to the community. The organization works annu-ally with other local energy companies on fund-raising efforts and donations to the United Way. As well, the company has worked with Sacred Heart Children’s Home in Laredo and South Texas Children’s Home Ministries in Pettus, providing meals, maintenance, and donations - including new computers and the construction of a new basketball court - as well as organiz-ing events for the homes, such as the children’s Christmas party and Easter egg hunt.

Wood Group PSN sponsors and supports local charitable events, such as the Youth Rally, an annual day of fun, food and activi-ties for underprivileged children in the area; Little League games, at which the company has provided between 250 and 500 meals for kids over the course of the season; and the local stock show and Lonesome Dove Fest, to which the company donates equipment and volunteers. It also offers up to four scholar-ships a year to high school seniors from the South Texas region.

As Glithero and Fralick explain, Wood Group PSN helps the community because it is the right thing to do. Period. And for the co-pres-idents of Wood Group PSN Americas, there’s no better reason than that.

In August of 2013, Wood Group PSN an-nounced that the Americas region president, Derek Blackwood, would be retiring and re-placed by not one but two co-presidents, John Glithero and Mitch Fralick. “It is an unusual situation,” Glithero admits. “Everybody we meet says, ‘How does this co-presidency work?’”

It may seem like an unusual move. But it be-gins to make sense once you consider that these two men oversee such a vast geographic area. Wood Group PSN Americas includes opera-tions in Canada, North and South America and the Latin Americas, not to mention the number of employees they are responsible for - 12,000, give or take, at any given time. After having the opportunity to meet and talk with Glithero and Fralick together one afternoon, the strategy actu-ally seems like an enlightened stroke of genius.

It’s a challenge to put into words the pal-pable synergy between this dynamic duo, and I’m not sure any sufficient comparisons truly exist. On their own, they’re great, but once combined it’s obvious they were meant to be together all along.

When it comes to the co-presidents’ professional relationship, the best compari-son may be the classic yin and yang. Fralick has onshore experience; Glithero has an offshore background. Fralick has a manage-ment degree, Glithero an engineering degree. Nevertheless, they share the same bottom line: Always put people first.

John Glithero: After graduating from Texas A&M University

in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, Glithero began a career in commercial con-struction and development before moving into the oil and gas industry. He previously worked in a company that was eventually bought by the Michael Baker Corporation and became Baker Energy. Glithero rose to the ranks of Vice President, a post he held for over a decade.

In 2002, Glithero joined Wood Group to start its operations and maintenance business in the United States, initially based offshore. In the years that followed, this branch of the company has grown remarkably.

Mitch Fralick: Fralick graduated from Stephen F. Austin

State University with a bachelor’s degree in business management and immediately en-tered the oil and gas industry. In 1988, during the historic industry downturn of the 1980s, Fralick and his partner, Jonathan Knapp, founded Producers Assistance Corporation (PAC), specializing in operations and main-tenance services and providing day-to-day production operations of wells and facilities.

Wood Group bought PAC in 2008, and Fralick was eventually named Senior Vice President of Onshore Operations.

Fralick notes that PAC has increased in size nearly eight times over since being acquired by

Wood Group. The operation that included just over 300 employees when it was sold to Wood Group now boasts roughly 1,800 person-nel. “[Wood Group] didn’t come in and try to change the way we did business,” Fralick con-tinues. “They bought a successful company and provided the resources for it to be even more successful.”

Wood Group entered the U.S. energy ser-vices market - having built the foundation of its business in the United Kingdom - by acquiring smaller successful companies and combin-ing them under the established strength and network of a global business. Therein lies the strength, and quite possibly the secret, behind the company’s incredible success.

Wood Group’s history dates back to the early 1900s in Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1912, William Wood founded Wood & Davidson, which provided ship repair and marine engi-neering services to the local fishing fleet out of the port of Aberdeen. Wood had seven sons, the youngest of which, John, would eventually take over the family’s portion of the business in the early 1950s.

In 1964, John Wood bought out the remain-ing shareholders and took full control of the company. That same year, John’s son, Sir Ian Wood, joined the business, which was appro-priately renamed John Wood & Son. The orga-nization’s operations continued to expand into general marine engineering and a few years later, Sir Ian was named managing director.

In the early 1970s, however, a series of events occurred that changed the course of history for the family business based in Scotland. Oil

TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

WOOD GROUP’S SCOTTISH ROOTS

fourth layer, is often referred to as “the way we do things around here.”

The idea of the Safety Cocoon originated at an annual meeting of all Wood Group PSN leadership, but it has been Fralick and Glithe-ro’s responsibility to educate all 12,000 of their employees on each safety measure.

Both men admit that can be quite a challenge. “We are so spread out geographically that

one of the areas of focus is continuing to find ways to test that our messages are getting to every employee,” Glithero states.

Naturally, the company employs traditional methods of communication - both internally and externally - through its communications department via newsletters, surveys, online outreach, management teams and project managers. The company also utilizes social media to reach its employees and the public.

However, Fralick and Glithero will quite often just show up and conduct their own, albeit less scientific, market research. “We’ll go to a shop in North Dakota [for example] and say, ‘Hey guys, who all is familiar with our Safety Cocoon?’” Glithero says. “And if you’re stand-ing there with 150 guys and only half of them raise their hands, we know we’ve got some work to do.”

The Safety Cocoon’s company-wide rollout was an exemplary effort in delivering consis-tent messaging to a massive, and often tran-sient, workforce. Starting last July, the program was introduced in phases to allow employees time to receive and absorb the information for each individual layer. First, the overall concept of the cocoon and the third layer, Life Saving Rules, were introduced to employees through a full-on campaign with mailers and distributions. The group enticed employees to complete the

Safety Quiz Challenge, which was used as a metric for participation. If one particular region had lower participation on the quiz, manage-ment was able to identify that area and employ further resources. So far, the company has seen great results regarding participation and increased safety performance.

The development of the HSE training facility in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale is largely indicative of the company’s strategic mentality of “think global - act local.”

“A lot of companies will come into an area, like the Eagle Ford for example, and take ad-vantage of ‘good times’ as we’ll call it,” Glithero explains. “We’ve always developed and estab-lished our business by coming into an area like we’re here for the long haul.”

In total, the property - including the facility and the adjoining lodge - represents a $12 million

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Today, Wood Group is an international leader in energy services with approximately $7 billion in sales, employing about 40,000 people and operating in 50 countries

COMMUNITY INVESTMENT:THE WOOD GROUP WAY

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Fourth layer:Behavioural StandardOur behaviours, whether you are a director,

manager, supervisor or worker, set the safety culture of our organisation. It’s often referred to as

‘the way we do things around here’. We want WGPSN to build a safety culture that is recognised by our people, our clients, subcontractors and the regulators as being second to none. To do this we all need to actively demonstrate those behaviours that will help build such a culture – our behavioural standard clearly states those behaviours for all levels of our organisation.

Third layer:Life Saving RulesWe have nine Life Saving Rules. They set our

minimum expectations for those activities which, based on an analysis of incidents, are most likely

to result in you being seriously injured. They help raise your awareness and provide you with some simple key actions which, when followed, will protect you and your colleagues from injury. We expect everybody, at all levels of our organisation, to comply with these rules.

Second layer:Hazard awarenessMany of our incidents result from our failure to

identify and manage workplace hazards. If we fail to spot and manage a hazard before we

start work then an incident is a very real possibility. We will provide you with some simple tools that will help you spot hazards and do something about them before they can cause harm. The tools will encourage you to work as a team to spot and eliminate the hazards. You also have the authority to stop any work if you see something that is unsafe.

First layer: AristosAs human beings we are constantly faced with

choices. When at work, often our decisions will determine whether we get home safely. The same

decision making process applies to all other aspects of our lives. We know right from wrong, we know what we should do but don’t always do it. Our “Aristos Experience” will help you understand why the decisions we make are not always the safest choice. It will help you make the right decisions and encourage you to step up when the decisions of others are putting our people at risk.

Safety Cocoon

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had been discovered in the North Sea, and Sir Ian saw mounting potential in this fledgling industry. The young visionary also saw the potential for Aberdeen to become the next big oil hub, after being inspired by a trip overseas to Houston in 1972. Over the next several years, the company spent considerable time and capital redirecting its business and resources toward the off-shore engineering business. In 1976, the first oil flowed up from Brent field, located in the East Shetland Basin off the Shetland Islands, which is where Wood Group would secure its first major offshore contract.

The 1980s was another formative era for Wood Group, as its two main interests were split in 1982, creating separate, more specialized companies: John Wood Group, which assumed the engineering, oilfield logistics and supplies and drilling services; and J W Holdings, the largest fishing company in Scotland at the time. By the end of the decade, John Wood Group was the largest homegrown oil service company in the United Kingdom, a growth trajectory it would continue to follow as it expanded its business internationally throughout the following decades.

Notable acquisitions made by Wood Group during the 1990s and early 2000s include Mustang Engineer-ing, a Houston-based firm providing deepwater process facility engineering services; Alliance Engineering, specializing in lightweight topside facilities; and J P Kenny, specializing in pipeline and subsea capabilities. Wood Group also created several partnerships and joint ventures throughout the decade with companies such as Rolls-Royce, Sulzer and TransCanada.

By 2000, Wood Group announced revenues exceed-ing $1 billion for the first time in its history; and two years later, the company managed a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange. In 2011, the company ac-quired Production Services Network Limited (PSN) and Wood Group PSN was officially formed. Today, Wood Group is an international leader in energy services with approximately $7 billion in sales, employing about 40,000 people and operating in 50 countries.

Offering high-quality brownfield services to custom-ers in more than 40 countries, Wood Group PSN spe-cializes in pre-operations, hookup and commissioning; operations and maintenance; engineering; construction; project management; and training and decommission-ing services. Its mission is to provide customer support to clients in order to enhance performance, maintain production, reduce operating costs, provide integrity assurance and extend the life of production facilities. The expansive network of highly trained employees and experts allows Wood Group to provide a wealth of services, from the start to the finish of a project.

Wood Group PSN operates in five regions around the globe: Africa, the Americas, Australia and Asia Pacific, the Middle East and ERC (Europe, Russia and Cas-pian). An intricate network of high-level, yet hands-on management provides consistent, high-quality service across all regions.

Wood Group is built on a solid foundation of seven core values, which are at the heart of everything the company does: safety and assurance, relationships, social responsibility, people, innovation, financial re-sponsibility and integrity.

Learn more about Wood Group by visiting the organiza-tion online at www.woodgroup-psn.com.

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Life SavingRules

All work including changes must be risk assessed1

You must be fit and able to do your job safely9Always wear a seat belt and never use any type of mobile phone8

Ensure all safety precautions are in place for ground works7

Obtain authorisation before entering a confined space6

Rigging and lifting processes and equipment must be planned, controlled and suitable for the job

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Take precautions when working over or close to water4

Protect yourself against a fall when working at height3

Verify isolations before work starts2

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For more information visit www.woodgroup.net/HSE/Safety/LSR

The Safety Cocoon is innovative, yet intentionally simplistic in nature, comprised of four layers focusing on hazard awareness, safety training, behavioural standards and life-saving rules