Energy Services BC, PSAC, CAPP and other oil and gas industry assocations in Canada have recently joined forces to develop various standards on nuisance issues that have been the source of ongoing complaints from local landowners in the communities in which oil companies, their contractors, and their employees operate.  Specific issues relate to communication (or lack thereof), dust, gates, garbage, noise and driving.

Oil companies have tried similar community relations programs individually in the past, including Encana's Courtesy Matters, and Murphy Oil's Good Neighbours.  The BC Government spearheaded an industry-wide effort by funding a consultation with local communities, and by calling for a joint registry of oil companies, called Living Together Working Together.  The most recent collaboration is an Canada-wide evolution or extension of that BC initiative, called Community Partners, which has the industry associations and their members working together to remind workers to treat people and property with respect by following a handful of rules. 

Participants in the Community Partners program will be asked to sign and distribute a policy statement, similar to the Petroleum Industry Guiding Principles.  As with all such initiatives, the challenge lies in communicating the policy and practices to employees.  Our software's Policy module is an obvious first step, but we've also created a brief orientation that covers the various nuisance issues and the recommended practices to avoid them.

After viewing the 13 minute orientation, employees are required to pass a 15-question quiz to verify their understanding.  The Community Partners Living Together - Working Together orientation will then show up on the worker's orientation card, which they can present to oil company work site supervisors to demonstrate their compliance with the program.

The lesson and quiz are both available at no cost.  Intersted parties can sign up here.

As many contractors in the Energy Services industry are aware, Shell Exploration now requires its contractors' employees to have taken training on their 12 life saving rules.  Safety representatives at Shell were kind enough to provide a PowerPoint presentation with various bullet points on a handful of slides.  Unfortunately the presentation was lacking in a few areas:

  1. There were no slide notes, so employers are left to interpret how the slides should be narrated.
  2. The last slilde (#19) referred to a test and a requirement to score 100%, but no questions were provided.
  3. There was no indication how contractors might track which employees had taken the orientation (and when).

At the request of some of our customers, we've put the Life Saving Rules into a lesson and prepared a handful of quiz questions to verify understanding of the material.


As with our other orientations, this lesson is available free of charge to existing and new customers.  Feel free to sign up for our Contractor Orientation module if you wish to provide this training to your employees.  Don't wait, because all contractors were expected to be compliant by July 1!

In my last blog post I mentioned Amazon's new electronic book (the Kindle), and how it's helping lead the tranformation from paper to electronic documents.  The other interesting development coming out of the Kindle is its computer-generated voice; and it's a decent one at that (listen here for a sample reading on YouTube).

Computer-generated voices are getting better and the overall acceptance of these voices are also improving.  Phone systems were the first to use this technology, but they're now used in GPS navigation systems, electronic books, and even online safety training.

As you may or may not know, the 130+ safety training lessons available on the SAFETYSYNC online Safety Management System all feature computer-generated voices.  Reaction to our training lessons is mixed.  There are users that are surprized to find out it's not a real person narrating the lesson, others are aware that the narration is computer-generated, but are unoffended by it, and there are some that have a hard time with it.  Fortunately the last group is in the minority, and when we check the feedback scores on these lessons, they are very high.

I must admit that the voices we use are highly advanced.  The method we use is called concatenative speech synthesis, and it is now the dominant format for computerized speech.  As text-to-speech technology improves, we will update our lessons.  Some day, our users may not even notice the difference.

Text-to-speech allows us to develop courses quickly, which leads to lower cost to our customers, and a more complete course selection.  Check out our sample lesson and quiz, and post a comment to let us know what you think!