The National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) has announced LLOG and SLB as the winners of the 2024 NOIA Safety in Seas Award Competition. LLOG is the Culture of Safety winner, while SLB won the Safety Practice Award.

At the awards ceremony in Washington, DC, NOIA President Erik Milito emphasized that success is a collective effort. LLOG COO Eric Zimmermann and CFO Philip Cossich and SLB Managing Director North America Offshore Anna Guichard and President Offshore Atlantic Wallace Pescarini accepted the awards in front of NOIA membership.

Compass Publications Inc., the publisher of Sea Technology magazine, established the NOIA Safety in Seas Award in 1978. 

Since 2014, NOIA has conferred two distinct safety awards annually to recognize excellence among those who, by their actions, design or influence, have contributed to improving the safety of life offshore.

The Culture of Safety Award honors overall organizational immersion in and commitment to safety, which has resulted in remarkable, measurable and sustained safety performance over a prolonged period of time.

The Safety Practice Award recognizes specific technologies, approaches, methods, or projects with direct and demonstrable impacts on improving safety.

LLOG’s entry outlines a remarkable journey toward fostering an empowered safety culture. Leaders at LLOG have methodically cultivated a supportive and transparent environment that encourages the sharing of concerns, mistakes, and observations. The response of leadership, particularly to adverse news, plays a pivotal role in nurturing this environment. One tangible manifestation of this empowered safety culture is LLOG’s Subsea Integrity Management Program (SIMP). SIMP represents a risk-based safety approach to managing critical subsea components. It utilizes digital twins empowered by machine learning algorithms to analyze standard monitoring data and conduct real-time engineering assessments of subsea components. Importantly, SIMP is integrated throughout the design process, not just post startup. As a result of this safety-focused approach, LLOG consistently surpasses industry averages in safety metrics.

SLB’s Safety Practice entry sheds light on a common industry challenge: What occurs when safety performance levels off? SLB’s response was to harness the power of people engagement and behavioral sciences. They concentrated on amplifying the engagement of both employees and contractors, empowering them to voice concerns at any given moment. One notable initiative, the Live Well Program, is part of a holistic health strategy addressing mental health and emotional well-being. Moreover, SLB is currently piloting the Unlock Your Power program, which furnishes employees with tools and strategies to bolster self-awareness and resilience to stress, integrating neuroscience, attention training and emotional intelligence. In tandem with the continuous adoption of digital tools utilizing artificial intelligence, teams can leverage video monitoring and gather insights from previously unmonitored data to further augment positive reinforcement and continuous improvement efforts. Despite a double-digit percentage increase in activity within SLB’s North America Offshore GeoUnit, they reported zero automotive accidents and a 13 percent decrease in injury frequency. Additionally, transitioning from a one-size-fits-all to a fit-for-purpose safety methodology resulted in a 30 percent reduction in total recordable injury frequency over the past five years, accompanied by a notable 115 percent increase in the report rate per employee per year.

See past award winners here.