Baseball is often called America’s sport because it has a long tradition of uniting Americans throughout history, over times both good and bad. For close to a century, especially over the past decade, the “shift” was used as a defense strategy until it was banned in 2022 for its unfair advantage to defend. This strategy adjusted or shifted standard positions to place more fielders on one side of the field or another based on where the hitter statistically put a ball in play. The result gave the defense a better chance of retiring that hitter.
The Houston Astros used the shift 2,000 times in one season, which averaged about 13 shifts a game.
Barry Morris, EHS Director for Tri-State Drilling, says that if you can understand baseball, you understand how safety works. “Baseball is based on analytics,” explains Barry. “If I know when this guy is hitting against right-handed pitchers, then 89% of the time, he's gonna hit the ball here. So why not put your guy there? The same thing applies to safety. If we know these indicators are prevalent in where we are going to be vulnerable and where we're going to have potential events, then why don't we put somebody there? And have that conversation.”
In January 2024, Tri-State fully adopted HCSS Safety, and just in the first year, they have made significant improvements with safety metrics and productivity in the field. The company is especially proud of the .58 EMR rating for a drilling company they have achieved, thanks in part to their adoption of HeavyJob. Collecting time cards is often the most straightforward proposition in the field because it directly relates to how people are getting paid. But where HeavyJob shines is how it connects the data in the field to the operations and analytics that drive decisions in the office.
Adding HCSS Safety to HeavyJob is a seamless process, operating in the same app and eliminating numerous forms of waste, from paper to time.
Analytics + Vulnerable Days
According to Tri-State’s safety analytics, Thursdays are their most incident-prone days. Typically, you might assume a Monday or a Friday would be the most sensitive days since there are so many distractions that can happen at the beginning and end of the week. Understanding exactly why Thursdays were important for Tri-State could not have come without collecting incidents in HCSS Safety.
“Our most vulnerable day is Thursday because that's the day we see the most incidents,” explains Barry. “By collecting that data and using it, we can focus on that day and say, ‘Hey, what's going on?’”
What they discovered was that because their crews travel on Fridays, Thursdays are the last day of the week for them - packing up and getting ready to move on coincided with the highest incidents, and this was something they needed to address. With this information, they were able to increase awareness so they could work to decrease the number of incidents on Thursdays.
As the EHS Director, Barry not only looks at the data but he helps executives and management scrutinize that same data for the groups they oversee. “We have a transmission group, a specialty group, and then we have our administration field support staff,” says Barry. “Take a look at your group and see what's going on. They can see who's turning in the most observations, and we encourage them to put in negative observations.”
For some workers, turning in negative observations might seem daunting, but it really shouldn’t.
“That's always a stigma, but we want to see those negative observations so we can do something about them,” says Barry. “Whether it's an unsafe condition or an unsafe act, you can see exactly what's going on with your project.”
The real question is: how do you get to this point in only one year?
Barry says the key is to gradually introduce the system to build the foundation and expectations from day one. Document everything you used to do, and pick three things that HCSS Safety can do digitally, whether that is with observations, JHAs, or weekly meetings. Whatever you used to do with paper and emails - get them comfortable with doing it in the program.
“When we kicked off, the three things we were looking at were observations, JHAs, and responses on our forms,” says Barry. “Of those, out of the year, now we've had 710 observations. For a small company of 120 people or less, that's huge. And out of those, 87 percent were positive, and 13 percent were negative.”
Barry would like to see the ratio of negative observations go up because that would mean people are identifying problems that can be worked on. The next step is to look at the type of meetings being held and how often they’re taking place. With analytics, you can see all of this data and identify where you can prioritize your effort.
See Something, Say Something
Oftentimes, negative observations are met with resistance because it doesn’t sit right to tattle on someone else. Barry is a firm believer that if something could prevent an accident from happening to somebody, then let's share it.
As a result, their program allows them to report observations without names.
“So we don't use names,” Barry confirms. “We say operator, or groundman, or employee, for example. We stay away from the names part of it. Then, we seek to understand, Why did that happen? What was the contributing factor? It goes away from the people-blaming to, What is it that's broken that we can fix? Yeah, we deal with humans, and we will make mistakes… And so if you do that, then you find that communication opens up.”
"At the end of the day, I'd rather have said something than not said something and somebody got hurt. And then they have to live with that always.”
—Barry Morris, EHS Director, Tri-State Drilling
Overcoming the Paper Problem
Before HCSS Safety, the problem was that someone would send an email that then got printed. The printed email got passed around to everyone, and once that was distributed, someone would have to take it, scan it, and then send it to safety. “Those days are gone,” says Barry enthusiastically. With Power BI and analytics of their safety data, they can get instant feedback from the field and make decisions in real-time.
Like baseball, safety depends on data, analytics, and practicing every day. The right set of observations can help you concentrate your efforts to defend your people in the field. With proper discipline and attitude, the culture and the people can shift. “It goes back to making it easy on the guys in the field,” says Barry. “Our benchmark was just to get started and see a base. I had no clue that we'd have that good of a response in our first year. It was exceptional, and now we want to build on that.”
HCSS Safety is not the only solution that Tri-State used to overhaul its paper processes to get up to speed in the digital world. Having to operate in 49 of the 50 states, they had to consider how they schedule their resources by adding HCSS Dispatcher, how they keep their equipment maintenance on track and mechanics’ time budgeted properly with Equipment360, and organizing all their client-required forms using HCSS Forms in HeavyJob.
With a company that seeks growth, they have partnered with HCSS to help them achieve the analytics they need to make the right decisions, keep their operations running, and, most importantly, protect the safety of their people. We congratulate Tri-State Drilling for being a finalist for the HCSS Construction Award and look forward to what this next year will bring.
Please visit our HCSS Construction Award page to learn more about this annual spotlight on the construction trailblazers who redefine efficiency, safety, and technological advancement.
