How communication in production impacts safety and efficiency.

In many significant safety incidents, like the BP Texas City refinery or Piper Alpha explosions, the information flow during shift handover played a significant role. When there is an information backlog, not everyone is aware of what’s going on in the plant—things can easily go wrong.

Not everybody sees improving the communication between shifts as an opportunity to raise production effectiveness, which helps to save money or enhance safety culture and produce Operational Safety Excellence.

Communication errors can cost a lot of money. As a simple example: if a task is missing in quality control, a batch might be labeled as lower quality and will need to be sold at a lower price. 

In this article, we overview the true place of production communication in the safety and efficiency balance puzzle, what are challenges arise while solving it and how to plant management can address them. 

Better informed people make better decisions 

Picture a typical shift handover in the morning: The person coming off their shift stands together with the person coming onto their shift for no more than 10 minutes. They look over the screen together and go over what is happening in the production area. 

They’ll often say that the shift was uneventful, and there is not a lot to discuss. If anything noteworthy happened, they might write it down in a little notebook or log.

But in this situation, there is probably a lot of information that is being left out. Data is also exchanged through in-person chatter, emails, and more. And sometimes, scrawlings in a notebook might be misunderstood by the next person. Or by a later Shift when they are trying to solve an issue.

So even if the following shift-start meeting is structured, information might be missing. 

Thus becoming well-informed becomes a lengthy process.

Getting up to speed on what’s going on in the production plan is a big pain point for many plants. It can take hours to figure out the real situation in the plant. What is different than usual? What needs to happen?

Shift handover can be ineffective because there can be a lack of structured communication between shifts and other layers of the organization, and reports can lack crucial details.

To minimize safety incidents and achieve Operational Safety Excellence, plants need to cut down the time it takes to exchange information.

Standardized shift handover = safer = efficient

If everything always happens the same way, extra time and effort can be saved through standardization. From the other angle, within the standardizing principles lies the idea that every abnormality in the process signals a potential error. From this point of view, “unstandardized work = potential error” is a true statement. So how standardized and reliable are your shift changes?

Another thing about recurring actions is that they could be captured, described, and used to train people. Thus you might assume that there would be no surprises.

But, in reality, in a vulnerable environment, plants must consider everything going on in and around the job. There are countless possible factors and situations you have to account for. And surprises still might come!

Being a core principle of Operational Safety Excellence, standardized work makes processes not only effective but also safe.

Working with standardized processes enables shifts to spread the knowledge consistently and share experience, capture lessons learned, and cooperate for joined continuous improvement while embracing and appreciating the current state of the plant.

Let them talk to each other in a structured way

Think of each shift change like a baton pass. 

It can be challenging to share a job with other shifts, as different shifts often have their own cultures and even styles. Sometimes things can even get a little competitive or tribal, and teams might develop individual goals.

While the different shifts have a shared responsibility to keep things running, this can sometimes lead to a lack of responsibility on any one person or team. 

Since not everyone will arrive for their shifts at the same moment, it can be hard to always perform a detailed handover and talk to the relevant counterparts about what is going on. 

When shift handovers happen, they are usually one-on-one between two people. This is good when the information being passed is relevant for a single person or job role. However, some info is essential for the whole team.

Many supervisor roles are only day shifts, they are usually not present during night shifts, while critical daily meetings usually only happen once during the morning shift.

Therefore, supervisors need to understand all the handover details and relay that information to their team quickly. Looking through the logs and going through a quick 10-minute handover often doesn’t provide enough structured information.