HSE Training and Communication
Vermilion’s HSE Focus Areas of Communications & Knowledge management highlights continual learning and information sharing to improve our performance and helps validate competencies across the organization.
Vermilion is committed to ensuring all of our staff understand the importance of HSE and demonstrate this in their actions. All Vermilion’s leaders – whether operational or functional – contribute to Vermilion’s success by generating HSE awareness, identifying hazards, and understanding and mitigating the HSE impact of requests made of staff and operations. That’s why our Performance Management system includes an HSE Competency for Leaders:
- Visibly acts in accordance with all HSE policies, standards, procedures, legislation and core values
- Engages staff to identify and mitigate hazards and risks in order to fully integrate HSE into Vermilion’s day to day culture, and
- Facilitates the sharing of HSE lessons learned.
We expect our leaders to act in accordance with our Core Values, HSE policies, Management Systems standards, procedures, and legislation, and to:
- Understand HSE requirements, make them a priority and integrate them into daily activities
- Walk the talk, not hesitating to intervene for the safety of all staff
- Report unsafe situations, be willing to be challenged and follow up on commitments; and
- Believe in continuously learning and take an active role in safety meetings, investigations and reviews.
We provide resources to help our leaders understand what success looks like. This focuses on:
- Our HSE Journey
- Human Behaviours
- Communication
- HSE Reporting and Investigations
- Hazard Recognition
- Risk Management, and
- New and Inexperienced Workers
We have advanced our Operator Competency Programs in Canada, France, The Netherlands and Australia. These projects have included knowledge identification, task inventory and procedures, SOP development and levels of assessment.
This work will help us fulfill our HSE vision of a healthy workplace free of incidents, but will also support more effective workforce planning, and increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
Additional HSE training takes many forms throughout our organization, and includes external certifications, internal training courses and seminars on topics such as HSE leadership training, hazard awareness and management, functional process hazard and risk analysis, incident investigation, first aid, ergonomics, road safety, work management, regulatory updates, and personal safety. In addition, our lunch and learn programs encompass HSE topics that cover topics related to work and beyond, including safe driving and safety at home.
HSE onboarding for all new employees, introduced in 2022, provides training modules that introduce our HSE culture and values, and provide education on HSE policies and procedures.
We believe that regularly communicating key HSE information supports our focus on culture, helping to create an environment of empowerment, trust and accountability. Our communications strategy therefore focuses on multi-layered, formal and informal communications via a variety of channels:
- Regular visibly active leadership and communication by our executive team
- Strong HSE messaging from our business unit leadership
- Accessible HSE information and documents available through our intranet and shared team sites
- Quarterly reporting of HSE KPIs to all staff via our intranet, and to our leadership, including the Board of Directors
- Mandatory monthly HSE meetings in every field district that all staff (field and administration) attend and senior management routinely participate in; quarterly, the HSE district meetings are replaced by HSE-focused town hall meetings that include our vendors (third party contractors)
- Regular HSE Leadership meetings at the corporate level, with participants that include our senior management team and HSE advisors from all divisions and subsidiaries, representing 100% of our staff
- Safety discussions in team meetings, led by both leaders and staff to encourage continuous focus on hazard identification and management
- Global HSE Perception Survey held every three years to seek feedback from all staff, in addition to business unit-specific Perception Surveys held more frequently, and HSE-focused questions within our annual Great Place to Work staff feedback survey
- HSE focus in all communications, including administrative matters, to ensure HSE messaging includes a focus on office as well as operational staff
- HSE stories on our intranet, with content encouraged from all staff members throughout the business
- Special events in our offices and field locations that focus on HSE, such as the 2023 HSE & Wellness Fair in Calgary, the World Day for Safety and Health at Work awareness day in Germany, and safe driving days in France