Teamwork training for safer seas
Training can create a culture that encourages information flow.
“One plus one plus one doesn’t always equal three,” Captain John Wright of WrightWay Training told Maritime Journal.
He was referring to the fact that there are often cultures of command that don’t allow people to tell those in the hierarchy above them that there is something wrong that needs addressing.
Captain Simon Flitch of WrightWay explained that non-technical skills (such as teamwork, communication, leadership, situation awareness and workload management) need to become a universal language, with mandatory training.
These things are important, Mr Flitch says, not only for ship’s crews but also for other disciplines such as tug crews, pilots, VTS operators and port and terminal operators. He points out that these skills mean teams “will work more effectively with each other, despite there being three or four interacting command centres each with their own objectives”.
Mr Flitch added that difficulties arise “when the key players are not necessarily all singing from the same hymn sheet and in some cases, don’t even have the hymn book.”
The lack of effective teamwork can be costly in damage to reputation as well as ships and port equipment, and there are those more serious events where lives have been lost.
Captain Wright told how he had got on rather well with a radio operator he’d met just a week before the young man was trapped aboard a rig and left to die alone. He tried to use the radio but couldn’t get a clear direction on what he was supposed to do since the airwaves were jammed with people trying to find out what was happening. Again, it seems that better communication could have prevented the tragedy.
However, Mr Wright explaied that training which shows people, not just tells people, how to enact a different kind of behaviour means that all those in a team can flag up issues before they escalate into a disaster. “Breaking the ‘mental concrete’ of wrongly-held perception is hard because we naturally seek information that tends to confirm our internal picture, he explaied, “so, our saving grace is found in the rest of the team.”
However, actively encouraging input from others further down the command chain can mean a change to the cultural norm. Transferring changes like these across the company means, he says, “a whole operation can learn to harness the enormous energy within the workforce that may previously have been untapped”. This leads to improvements in both safety and business performance.
To conclude, Mr Wright pointed to the figures. The results of this kind of training are greater profits, reduced risk of injury, a safer working environment and a happier workforce. “Using these methods, in two years, one client sent 213 people home in one piece that statistically would have been injured, saved over 5,000 man days, and avoided $7.5m in direct costs.”
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