The Zero Incident Industry

Here at Norbulk we have always treated the safety of our colleagues, both at sea and ashore, with the utmost importance. It is vital that we, as a Company, continue to push towards a goal of ‘Zero Incidents’ on board our good vessels and ensure that all of our employees return safely at the end of each working day, be that to their homes or when they retire to their cabins for some well earned recuperation.

With this desire and goal in mind Norbulk joined the ‘Partners in Safety’ initiative in 2013, and along with our mutually passionate partners in this venture, has been promoting the following pillars and foundation of the program on board our managed fleet:

·       Leadership Visits, 

·       Reflective Learning, 

·       Learning Engagement Tools, 

·       Resiliency.

This has been a great success so far on board. Results of the satisfaction surveys, which were conducted at the end of 2017, have been distributed to the fleet with the Q4/2017 Quarterly Statistics.

The ultimate aim of the training is to improve the safety culture aboard our vessels and in our offices, however elements of the initiative can also be transferred to everyday life and encourage you to address situations in a more positive and thoughtful way which will not only improve personal safety but also improve communication between colleagues and lead to a more conscious and focussed mentality within a group.

Following implementation of the program, safety statistics of participating companies, Norbulk included, have improved from a serious incident occurring once every 7 days to one serious incident in 25 days at the end of 2016. This is a great result for both Norbulk and the industry as a whole. The job is not yet finished however as we are still hard at work to reach our ultimate goal of NO serious incidents on board. Norbulk have and will continue to endeavour to improve on the quality of program implementation to achieve even better results.

The foundation of the initiative is the Resilience training and one of the initiatives which Norbulk believed would assist us to reduce our incidents is to not simply limit our teaching and participation to the vessels.  Therefore in October last year we began to run the Resiliency sessions in the Glasgow office. They are conducted once a month with a different facilitator each time. The program has been very well received in the office and after we had conducted 2 or 3 modules to iron out any possible teething problems we have now extended this practice to all offices associated with Norbulk.

In order to get the best out of this initiative it is important that we have everyone working in the same direction and we believe that having all staff participate will allow us to achieve our ultimate goal.