HSE has always been an important area in Mantena, but we are now taking measures to strengthen HSE work even further.
The upheaval in the railway sector in recent years has led to new requirements regarding efficiency, which in turn have increased focus on safety and risk assessment. Marlene Furnes Bagley is responsible for HSE in Mantena. She works to take the HSE work in the company a step further, with focus primarily lying on follow-up of incidents and associated reporting.
– In Mantena, we are good at reporting incidents that have already happened. But we can become even better at reporting incidents and near-misses. Strengthening the culture of reporting and learning from the mistakes we make is an important part of this work. Some may have a somewhat strained relationship to deviations, both in terms of reporting them or being the one who receives a deviation. It may be associated with something negative, making a mistake or not being good enough. We must get away from this thinking. On the contrary, we should look at a deviation as a gift, says Bagley. She believes that every deviation is a golden opportunity to discover what she calls “blind spots”, giving us the opportunity to learn something new and constantly improve.
Continuous improvement
Working well with HSE requires constant focus. What was good enough HSE work ten years ago is not necessarily sufficient today. Bagley and her colleagues have clearly taken note of this.
– The key to good HSE work lies in continuous improvement. As a learning organisation, we must therefore work to get better and better and constantly share our experiences. What happens in one workshop must be shared with our other workshops so that the same type of incident does not happen again. We must constantly analyse and find the underlying reasons why something went wrong, and what we can do differently to prevent it from happening again. This mindset must be central in the entire organisation.
Developing an HSE culture
For Bagley and her colleagues, the focus on reporting and continuous improvement is about building culture.
– For us, there is nothing more important than safety and ensuring our employees come home in one piece, every single day. To achieve this, we cannot be afraid to talk about what didn’t go as planned regarding incidents and near-misses. Risk assessments and reporting of deviations must be in the backbone of each individual employee. Our focus on HSE in the future will be about building and strengthening the entire HSE culture in the organisation from top to bottom.