Building a culture of safety

It was important to create a positive safety culture right from the start, and to this end, communication was key. The first safety engineer, Andy Anderson, joined the Company in 1940. He had a reputation for using innovative techniques to promote safety, including filmmaking.

Four years later, Charles Homewood, a radio operator from the early exploration days turned electrical engineer, became the chief safety engineer. Over the span of three decades, he pioneered new ways of communicating safety. He promoted the use of posters, art, and graphic imagery, as chronicled in the Aramco publication The Art of Safety.

Initially, designing safety communications was down to the engineers in Dhahran. They produced a series of stickman images demonstrating safe behaviors – from holding a heavy box correctly to checking electrical cables. Over time, these efforts gave way to more elaborate artwork as professional artists took over.

The Company also sought to get workers involved with a competition back in 1948 to design a safety poster being an early example of a crowd-sourcing, participatory approach. By opening up the development of safety communications among employees, these tactics helped embed safety as a way of thinking.

Digital technology is also making new safety behaviors possible. Aramco uses augmented and virtual reality to bring safety training to life.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are being used to inspect high-rise equipment such as flare tips. These UAVs enable inspectors to survey these locations without endangering lives. It has also been used for search and rescue operations in Safaniyah.  Digital helmets are empowering field technicians, while real-time digital data processing enables us to flag potential workplace hazards immediately.

In 2020, Aramco achieved its lowest-ever total case rate, while also recording its lowest rates in a decade for lost time injury and motor vehicle accidents . These figures suggest that adopting Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies is already improving safety performance, while also providing a useful prompt for people to think about safety afresh.

Building a safety culture in all realms of life

A testament to the decades of embedding safety into the corporate culture are the images and illustrations that remain from that time. Eight decades of images, collected in The Art of Safety book, reveal the unflagging efforts of Aramco's safety experts to encourage a safety mindset – extending into off-job and recreational safety, among employees and their families, too.

Six posters that depict how safety has evolved at Aramco