Roads to Resilience

People and culture

The culture at Drax Power Station is built around safety, because operating the complex plant brings with it inherent risks. The power station’s culture needs to build on the experience of individuals and teams; avoid complacency; make continuous improvements; create a desire to learn; and embed this thinking not only with all employees but also with contractors. A manager described this as, “ I think the safety culture is primarily what we aim for, it has got to be built on a continuous improvement ethos and, to develop that culture, every individual working within the business has to be open to challenge ” (Engineering and Safety Manager). Day-to-day running of the plant requires a breadth of experience at the employee and team-level: “ in the job it is the experience that you gain and you learn that only through experience. [What is crucial is] ‘knowing’ the plant that you’re dealing with … The best unit controllers are controllers who have learnt the job from the ground level ” (Unit Shift Controller). Running the plant requires numerous processes and, to avoid complacency, Drax uses the concepts developed by Professor James Reason 3 . He is a risk management expert who says that organisations should never feel at ease. His thinking is widely applied at Drax Power Station to maintain a “ ‘chronic unease’, so complacency must not set in ” (Generation Manager). One manager explained how he individually perceived this feeling as, “ every day you come to work, you come to work believing that this could be the day you get injured and it is your job to work with the teams, with your supervisor to identify what could injure you and prevent it ” (Engineering and Safety Manager). Constantly learning how to run the plant more safely and efficiently is viewed as essential: “ we’ve got to have the ability to learn, we need to be asking, enquiring, learning from others, there is generally someone at Drax who has performed this task or a similar task before: What issues have they had? Learn from them. ” (Generation Manager). It is recognised that, “ the second trait of all successful safety organisations is that you look for broader learning, which is what we try to do every week with the ‘Safety Pack’ … we’re looking at all the incidents that have happened across the site and we’re looking for broader learning ” (Engineering and Safety Manager). In addition to looking for learning from within the organisation, Drax constantly looks outside: “ we do work with the universities [and] … our guys have spent a lot of time going over to various places … [For example], Scandinavia, where they’ve got a very good history of working with biomass … learning, and engineers talking to each other, and sharing ideas ” (Head of Risk and Corporate Finance). A key issue at the power station is that much cleaning, maintenance and construction work is carried out by contractors. Here, the challenge is to have external suppliers adopt the same attitude towards safety because: “ I think at the moment we have probably got something like 2000 contractors on site ” (Engineering and Safety Manager). As contractors are from other organisations, they need to be managed carefully: “ our staff have the ability to learn because it is fed to them all the time. You haven’t time to give some of the contractors the ability to learn, they’re only here short term [so] … you’ve got to be much firmer and you’ve got to be able to get that message round … We take a very firm stance: if contractors break the rules … they’re ‘off-site’ [immediately and] the word gets quite quickly round the contracting fraternity ” (Generation Manager).

3 See, for example, Reason’s book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents, 1997 .

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Roads to Resilience: Building dynamic approaches to risk to achieve future success