This explored the relationship between paperwork, management and safety by way of a web-based survey of 187 offshore managers from the same oil company.
It’s argued that various industries, like oil & gas, face increasing degrees of administrative & bureaucratic tasks compared to earlier time periods and this affects managers’ abilities to perform hands-on leadership. It may also push people to focus on more trivial issues with little safety risk.
Results
Findings indicated that managers regularly struggle to meet their company’s goal of spending at least 4 hours per day out on the frontline. Most of the 12 h shift was spent indoors in front of the computer, reading & responding to emails and reporting on safety tasks.
Additionally, a lot of managers’ time was spent in formal & informal meetings. Up to 72% of managers spent 3 hrs or less outdoors and 59% said they weren’t spending as much time outdoors as they wanted. 89% believed that hands-on/outdoor work leads to more visible management & influence and provides them opportunities to learn about operational issues.
Only 4% said that the company’s measurement of their performance affected their reasons for wanting to spend more time outdoors – which according to the authors indicates that the needs & benefits of hands-on work are internalised by managers.
Next the paper focused on why managers spent more time indoors than out – the barriers were divided into planned/scheduled barriers and unplanned/interruptions. For planned tasks, regular meetings were cited as the most important barrier towards hands-on work, with one manager stating, “I spend too much time at meetings which are not that relevant to my work” (p2984).
Reporting & using the various information systems onboard & personnel administration were said to be time consuming. Interestingly, one third of the offshore managers cited the incident reporting system as a major barrier for hands-on involvement.
For unplanned tasks, unscheduled personnel management, phone calls & responding to emails were emphasised the most by managers as time thieves. Requests for information from shore was also seen as a major barrier to more outdoor work. Notably, several managers complained that these requests for info wasted their time given that this info was already registered in the info systems, but it’s easier for shore-based people to just call offshore managers directly.
Expanding here, 6 out of 10 managers reported emails as “the single most important source of interruption and barrier to outdoor work” (p2985). Email was perceived by offshore managers to be misused – commonly used to distribute unnecessary info via CCing and used for discussion & decision-making rather than communication.
In conclusion, it’s seen that the majority of managers believe they currently spend too much time on paperwork. Although company policy is to be more hands-on (with a goal of 4 hrs daily), this is difficult to achieve in practice where managers may spend as little as 1-2 hours of 12 hr shifts outside.
Regarding emails, the authors pose a question about whether excessive use of emails may be more than exchanging information but also a type of impression management, where “e-mails are one way to be visible or present in today’s organization, where attention, rather than information, is scarce?” (p2985), and further where emails are used for social control to put pressure on addressees to conform to social norms.
Finally, they discuss the challenges of managing modern information management systems (HSE incident systems, project management, financial etc). Managing these systems changes the content of managerial work, where more time is spent on coding information, becoming a task in its own right (p2986).
Also, these systems seek to codify operator & operational knowledge and thereby reduce variability, but in the process remove degrees of freedom from operators, reducing their flexibility, adaptation & problem-solving abilities which “are core values in the [oil] company itself and central to the robust work practices” (p2986).
Link to the LinkedIn review: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-bite-paperwork-management-safety-towards-life-ben-hutchinson/
Safety & Performance Research Summaries 