HOW WELL DO YOU PLAY WITH OTHERS
DAY IN AND DAY OUT IN THE SAME SANDBOX? 

I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello!

(“Hello, Goodbye,” by the Beatles, 1968)

The ability to communicate by verbal and written means is crucial for safe process unit operations. Possessing the emotional intelligence to control and accurately interpret body language is also highly desirable.

 

Great Social Skills Build Great Teams

Shift workers work in close proximity to each other; even more so for those that work at remote locations like oil/gas rigs. Respect for personal space and a tolerance of idiosyncrasies are necessities.

Janice in Human Resources is well aware that a team is only as strong as its weakest link and that having an obnoxious, overbearing shift mate will reduce the productivity of the entire shift.

The first encounter between a company recruiter and a prospective employee will be to ascertain if the candidate has real social skills as opposed to a cyber social network.

The Human Resources Department has methods that differentiate who can play well in a sandbox with others day after day.

 

Don’t like Humanity? Then Don’t Pursue Process Operations!

Once upon a time…prior to the advent of the internet and social media to be exact…people knew how to interact civilly with each other because it was a matter of survival. The way to describe the outcome of two people who instantly appreciated each other upon meeting would be phrased: “they really clicked.”

The computer age has made it possible to obtain almost anything a body needs to survive without any direct contact with a human being. A ‘cyber friendship’ eliminates the inconvenience of tolerating the imperfections of a real friend. Nowadays it is possible to “click off” any cyber interaction that offends and begin interaction with a different ‘cyber friend.’

The recruiting staffs of processing industry employers are aware that cyber nerds can make great grades and look good on paper. Cyber nerds will still not be hired unless they can demonstrate that they have sufficient emotional intelligence to cope with, tolerate, and forgive the transgressions of real live people.

To reiterate, any PTOA Readers that are card-carrying Loners and proud of that fact need to stop reading PTOA and return to the video attraction that is co-currently running on-screen. Process Operations is not the career for you.

 

Adapting Social Skills to the Setting

The successful employee candidate will need to demonstrate understanding the fine line between the polar opposite social settings described below. These situations truly can occur at the work site within hours of each other:

• Works independently on his/her own without supervision...
  AND YET...
  is a valued member on any team.
• Will advocate persistently yet respectfully for a better, safer approach to solve a problem...
  AND YET...
  Instinctively knows when to retreat and happily does as s/he is told.

Quick! How would you answer the following interview questions?

• Can you relate an experience wherein you were put into the position of having to influence an opposing personality on a team to accept your point of view and/or solution to a dilemma? (FYI: Your answer will be more impressive if the opposing personality is a co-worker and especially a supervisor)
• What was the outcome of that experience?

Do not stress if you cannot instantly relay a spellbinding case history experience. There is plenty of time to rack up some real-time teamwork experiences.

It took Your Mentor years to understand that the outcome of any large project is much better when a collaborative team approach is used. Two heads are always better than one. Three heads are better than two, etc.

The “I’ll just do it myself so I know it’s done right” approach yields an inferior outcome that will need expensive corrections in the short-term and will always be more costly to operate during its lifetime. That conclusion is based on the fact that not one person on this earth can know what they don’t know.

 

Shift Work Safety and Writing Skills

The Process Operator will also need to have technical writing skills. Technical writing differs from compositional writing. Compositional writing rambles on and on….like what you are reading right now! Technical writing gets directly to the important facts.

The shift work structure is ripe for crucial information to be lost between shifts. A tired Process Unit Operator might forget to mention a “detail”… like a gate valve that is usually wide open is currently now closed or vice versa.

Written notes accumulated over the shift help to reduce the loss of crucial information.

At the end of each shift, the tired Process Operator that is concluding his/her shift will review the logged notes with his/her replacement. Hence, the phrases “pass on discussion” and “pass on notes.” Pass on notes are typically written in jargon that is specific to the process.

Pass on notes/ logged entries are legal information that would be scrutinized as evidence in the event an equipment or process failure warranted an incident investigation.

Process Operators also write many kinds of procedures and fill out work permits. They also participate in generating Incident Reports. Incident Reports document events that contributed to a "near miss" or an "actual" safety or equipment failure. These subjects are covered in later PTOA segments.

 

Take Home Message: The shift work structure of industrial processing requires Process Operators to be proficient with real life social communications and technical writing. The safety of the facility depends upon the ability of shift members to communicate and solve problems together. Technical writing skills are required to record and pass on what occurred during the shift. PTOA Readers who do not want to interact with humans should stop reading the PTOA now.

Photo credit: http://thefearlessheart.org

 

©2014 PTOA Orientation Segment 11

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