COVER STORY
Safety Targets for the Year
Delivered in One Quarter, With
Gamified Simulation Training
Safety and culture experts Propel Sayfr, in partnership with Attensi, have created a safety training
solution for the digital age. SAYFR immerses its users in an interactive 3D simulation of their working
environment, designed to educate best practice and to test their abilities across a range of realistic
scenarios.
Its first client, shipping operator K Line, used SAYFR to instill a culture of safety excellence amongst its
staff. The company wanted to foster a culture of openness around on-board errors and failures, in order
to learn from them. Having rolled-out SAYFR as a training tool for its seafarers, K Line met its ‘reported
near misses’ key metric target for the whole year within the first quarter after launch.
When a single incident could result in loss
of life and millions in financial penalties,
good safety culture is non-negotiable for any
maritime operator. An incredible 75% of
maritime losses are attributable to human error.
And while it’s hard to find a shipping or offshore
company today that does not claim to be an
‘industry leader’ in the field, the practical reality
of instilling safety culture comes with significant
challenges.
For safety and culture experts Propel Sayfr, these
challenges are only too familiar. Established
in 2010, the company has built a unique data
set based on the behaviors of over 150,000
individuals working in shipping and offshore. Its
purpose is to answer a difficult question - why
are some operators better at managing safety
than others?
“While some companies make a point of dealing
with and learning from incidents upfront, others
still suffer from a mindset of hiding them away,”
explains Didrik Svendsen, Partner at Propel
Sayfr. “To address this, we built our statistical
data model to prove the connection between
individuals’ behaviour and safety success. If
these behaviours can be measured, then we can
change them effectively.”
It is this commitment to analysing individual
operating decisions, and their impact on
frequency of incidents, that underpins what
Propel Sayfr offers to its clients. The operations
of the client company are closely monitored
and measured, with findings presented back
as data-driven recommendations for altering
behavioural norms. And with these changes, a
true ‘safety excellence’ culture can be created.
After five years of operating, Propel Sayfr’s
results had won multiple clients and many
admirers. But something else was needed
to take full advantage of this new-found
methodology. As Svendsen and his fellow
partners realised, the nature of training itself
had become a limiting factor. “We had the
methods, what we lacked was the ability to
scale our approach. If you really want to reach
people through training, they have to be able
to visualise the tasks and incidents being
discussed. Which is why we started to search
for technology partners that worked with 3D
avatars.”
Attensi, a provider of gamified simulation
training, had the solution that Propel Sayfr
needed. The company combines best practice
from the worlds of workplace psychology,
training, and gaming to create immersive
training simulations that empower users to
learn new skills, with measurable impact
on organisational KPIs. Together, the two
companies collaborated to create a new
flagship training solution, SAYFR.
SAYFR users are immersed in a 3D graphical
recreation of their workplace environment
and challenged to complete a range of scripted
scenarios. Each is designed to simulate the
kind of processes and mishaps that can lead to
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