Raising safety standards

Across the industry

We share our safety experience and standards with other operators, contractors and professional organisations, including the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP), the Energy Institute and IPIECA, the global oil and gas industry association for advancing environmental and social performance.

In 2019, we contributed to the IOGP’s guide to fatigue and driver fatigue awareness campaign, which IPIECA also supports. We shared materials developed by our health specialists so they can be used by others in the industry.

We worked with the Energy Institute, IOGP and several contractors to launch learning materials, which encourage reflection on how contractors and clients can jointly manage safety risks.

With our contractors

We employ a large number of contractors and we work with them to ensure they understand our safety requirements. Together, we build skills and expertise to improve safety performance.

For example, we worked with several South Korean and Malaysian shipyards and contractors between 2017 and 2019 to develop common safety practices. At one site in Malaysia, all contracting companies agreed to adopt the common health, safety and environmental management system of the yard, which helped to deliver a more consistent approach and a stronger safety performance.

Since 2014, Shell executives have collaborated in pairs with executives of major contractor companies – as part of Shell’s contractor safety leadership programme – to identify strategies and practical steps to improve safety culture and achieve our Goal Zero ambition of no harm and no leaks. They also worked to drive standardisation together. The programme has a joint safety vision, which they call a declared future, and includes 19 companies.

Together with these contractors, we have signed up to a set of worker welfare principles developed by Building Responsibly, a group of leading engineering and construction companies (see Supply chain).