Coloring book takes safety message home to employees’ families

While workplace safety is a priority for drilling companies, as it should be, MB Century has identified one often-forgotten area where safety messages and efforts should be targeted – the home front.

MB Century (formerly Century Resources), which provides drilling rigs to the Australian and Asia Pacific regions, has implemented several best practice safety systems and programs in recent years, such as bahavior-based safety observations, hazard identification cards and Step Back 5×5. Now, the company has developed a safety initiative that goes beyond traditional drilling company safety programs and takes safety home to the families of rig workers.

According to MB Century, experience has shown that injuries to employees’ families – particularly their children – have a significant impact on the employees themselves. There is an impact even when rig workers hear about another rig worker’s child being hurt at home.

The MB Century Initiative is a Safety at Home & Work campaign, which includes a coloring book that provides educational safety messages associated with coloring activities and learning about safety by the use of pictures.

The coloring book was developed so that it is relevant to rig workers’ families. It contains 18 coloring pictures that are divided equally between rig and home situations and include the names of the rig crew as well as safety equipment. Pictures in the home setting show potential hazard situations. The intent is to encourage employees to play a leading role when they are at home with their children and to teach and coach their kids that safety at home is just as important as safety on the rig.

With this coloring book initiative, MB Century hopes to help rig employees to teach, coach and answer questions from their kids and other family members about rig and home safety situations. The company says it believes this to be a good learning exercise for the whole family. The ultimate outcome is that all MB Century rig workers and their families will apply the lessons from the book’s safety messages and demonstrate these messages by using them at work and at home, thereby helping to achieve no injuries.

The book is currently available in English and Indonesian. The company plans to translate it into Arabic for its Oman operations.