Page 11 - Suncor 360 - May-June 2015

SAFETY COMMITMENTS
Our executive leadership team shared their personal safety commitments last April, and asked the rest of the company to do the same. Here, a few members of the ELT reflect on their commitment.
ELT MEMBER
THE COMMITMENT
A YEAR LATER
I will hold our leadership team, including myself, to account for the company’s safety performance. And I plan to continue to reinforce safety through leadership by example.
To intervene when
I observe an unsafe situation outside of the workplace as well
as within.
We have doubled down on safety as an executive leadership team (ELT). Whatever other pressures we are under, I am ensuring the ELT spends the time we need to talk about safety and give it our full attention at every meeting. In the past year, the ELT has scheduled twice as much time as we used to on safety matters.
What I love about my safety commitment is that it made me ‘unconsciously aware’ of potentially unsafe situations and the most frequent subject of my interventions was myself. Things like maintaining multiple points of contact on stairs, wearing proper eye and hand protection when doing yard work, taking the right precautions with household and garden chemicals – these are examples of situations where I had to stop myself, ask what could go wrong,
and take corrective steps.
Kris Smith
EVP Refining & Marketing
To always make safety the top priority and relentlessly look for opportunities
to improve safety in our workplace.
We have made real progress in sharpening our focus on serious injury potential events, improving our lessons learned processes across R&M, reinvigorating our joint health and safety committees, and consciously embedding our operational discipline behaviours in all of our key safety processes. As well, we are actively plugged into the Oil Sands Safety Step Change Task Force so we can leverage the learnings from that work into our business.
To get out more into the field, to better hear our people’s safety issues and ideas first-hand, and genuinely help us advance our journey.
With our austerity efforts I have actually travelled less this year, which has made ‘getting into the field’ more difficult than planned when I made the commitment. As such, I've tried to better leverage my regular daily encounters with people in my own communications sessions, meetings, phone calls, teleconferences and other forums. Amazing how a simple question like asking people how they think Suncor can improve safety performance can open up rich, diverse and meaningful conversations.
I’ve then tried to share some of these observations and stories I’ve heard in other safety moments I lead.
Steve Williams
President and CEO
Janice Odegaard
SVP and General Counsel
Eric Axford
EVP Business Services
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