Perspectives

There was a small number of overdue maintenance tasks related to safety-critical equipment, but these were being risk-assessed and deferred for limited periods of time.

Maintenance of other less critical equipment, however, had begun to suffer.

Further investigation found the company - as part of a cost-cutting strategy - had decided to make the position of ‘marine roustabout’ redundant on board their rigs.

The position of a roustabout is one that requires non-specific and broad-based skills, mainly physical labour, with no safety-critical duties.

This decision had duly been risk-assessed by onshore management. It had been concluded that other roustabouts from the drilling team could provide cover for any specific assistance the marine department needed.

However, what the company had failed to take into account was the fact that the marine roustabout also doubled up as support to the maintenance department when not specifically needed by the marine department.

It wasn’t officially written into the job role of a marine roustabout; that was simply the way things worked on board. The offshore rig management had found this to be a way of effectively managing their resources.

So, while the marine department was able to manage its workload with the assistance of drilling roustabouts, the maintenance department felt the effects of the marine roustabout redundancy.

Marex advised the company that rather than dealing with the problem at the equipment level, they needed to address the problem at the systems level, so that the underlying organisational factor (i.e. inadequate staffing on the rig) was addressed.

There are three key takeaways from this:

1. Involve all stakeholders in critical decision-making – and remember, this includes meaningful representation from relevant frontline workers as well.
2. In order to achieve the company objectives, frontline workers may have to adapt their practices and processes based on the situations they face at work. Be prepared to acknowledge the potential gaps between “work as imagined” as written down in policies and procedures, and “work as done” in reality on the ground.
3. Build resilience into your organisational setup – proactively work towards ensuring that things go right rather than focusing purely on avoiding things from going wrong. Most of the adaptations in everyday work have successful outcomes but go unnoticed – there could be a lot of useful learnings to be taken from such adaptations.