Leading in personnel safety

When it comes to the safety of our people, our Nobody Gets Hurt aspiration supports our mindset to be the most responsible operator in our industry.

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Image United Nations Sustainable Development Goals related to this content.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals related to this content.

It underpins every decision we make as a company, from the boardroom to the wellhead. Our commitments are documented in the Safety, Health, Environment, and Product Safety policies found in our Standards of Business Conduct.

We have long embedded safety into our culture, reinforced by leadership, standards, practices, and experience. We focus on an integrated framework of systems, processes, tools, and behaviors aimed at eliminating injuries and fatalities.

Care for our workforce is a core value and foundational to what we do. Guided by Nobody Gets Hurt, we continue to improve the processes that support our safety vision, further enhancing our protocols, and making use of internationally recognized best practices.

Our approach

We aspire to a working environment where Nobody Gets Hurt.

We are committed to protecting the safety, security, and health of our employees, our contractors, and others involved with our operations, as well as our customers and the public.

We focus on continuous improvement through our Operations Integrity Management System (OIMS), which sets expectations for managing the risks inherent to our business.

In 2023, we maintained industry-leading personnel safety performance with a Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) of 0.02 per 200,000 work hours. We sustained this rate in 2024.1,2

We track injuries and illnesses for both employees and contractors. This includes fatalities, fatal incident rate, lost time incident rate, and total recordable incident rate. These safety metrics can be found in our Sustainability Performance Data Table.

Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR)1,2

Incidents per 200,000 work hours

Incident Rate graph
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our people. Keeping them safe requires intense focus and relentless discipline, 24 hours a day, every single day.”
Headshot of Darren W. Woods
Darren Woods
Chairman and CEO


Setting expectations for excellence

We establish annual continuous improvement goals and objectives in a number of areas, including:

  • Personnel Safety Management System.
  • Life-saving rules and actions and Start Work Checks.
  • Human performance.
  • Culture of Health.
  • Training.

For more than 30 years, our Operations Integrity Management System (OIMS) has guided the daily activities of our global workforce by setting clear expectations for managing the risks inherent to our business. Third-party providers and contractors are also included in the OIMS framework, and we include specific safety and health expectations in our contracts.

Leaders engage with their teams to drive effective application of OIMS. Each business unit has leadership management systems and work processes to help meet operations objectives.

Our OIMS process meets the requirements of ISO 14001/45001 as annually certified/attested by Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance. The ISO management system helps us further manage potential impacts, fulfill compliance obligations, and identify opportunities for improvement. Our Incident Investigation Framework is consistent with International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) 621 and makes use of enhanced techniques and learning standards.

The key components of PSMS include:

Personnel Safety Management System graphic

Personnel Safety Management System

From 2021 through 2023, a cross-functional team worked to create an integrated, end-to-end safety standard for our operations. The team engaged both inside and outside the company to discover, benchmark, and evaluate the latest in safety best practices. This work was anchored in OIMS, grounded in behavioral science, and drawn from best practices in the industry and our own field experience. Rollout is expected to be complete by the end of 2026.

This new Personnel Safety Management System (PSMS) is designed to consistently deliver “safety in the moment.” Absence of incidents is, of course, a key measure of success, but PSMS goes further. Leading indicators such as safeguard effectiveness, leader engagements, and worker engagements help us verify and validate our efforts.

The system is a tool to enable effective management of safeguards before and during higher-risk work by:

  • Proactively learning from work.
  • Building and validating the safety capacity of our workforce.
  • Driving effective safety engagement across interfaces.
  • Leveraging the latest human performance concepts.

It all ties back to our core value of Care. The PSMS clarifies expectations at every level to teach people how to be safety leaders no matter where they work. It establishes a streamlined personnel safety standard with common language, processes, and tools. And it prioritizes our efforts according to risk and life-altering potential. Through repetition and coaching, the PSMS is helping to further build the safety capacity of our workforce.

Start to finish: Life-saving Rules & Actions

Life Saving Rules & Actions (LSRAs) are an important part of our PSMS. Our employees and contractors work together to execute the LSRAs for routine work with higher-risk elements. They also work to enhance our understanding of higher-risk work like confined-space entry, mechanical lifting, and working at heights. This helps to verify that safeguards are in place before work begins and through the end of the process.

Our LSRAs fully integrate the language of the IOGP Life-saving Rules program (IOGP Life-saving Rules Report 459).

Start Work Checks support our LSRAs. These checks are designed to help supervisors and crew leaders lead interactive, detailed safeguard verification discussions before higher-risk work even begins. This process is aligned with concepts in IOGP Start Work Checks Report 459-1.

Targeted Learning Observations (TLOs) are peer-to-peer opportunities for our people to observe their coworkers in action. After each TLO, the observer, the observed, and a supervisor discuss the work tasks as planned and the work as it was done to assess how the safeguards were maintained.

Human Performance approach

Human performance

Human performance concepts are part of our operations, including human performance fluency training. These concepts are a key feature both of OIMS and PSMS processes and tools (e.g., pre-task briefing, job safety analysis, task observation).

In 2024, we jointly hosted a Safety Collaboration Forum with others in the industry, with a specific focus on human performance. Members of the forum have formed a community of practice to maintain focus on this issue and develop shared frameworks for the industry.

Culture of Health

To improve the health, quality of life, and productivity of employees, we provide a comprehensive Culture of Health program. This program provides an environment and resources that actively and consistently promote healthy and safe behaviors. This includes biometric screening, health surveys, well-being champions, resources to help employees with resiliency, and more.

Training

Our global training system delivers role-based safety, health, and security training to employees. Progress and completion are tracked and stewarded, and refresher training is offered as needed. ExxonMobil-specific and other relevant training is shared with contractors and others if required for services in our facilities. Non-operated joint ventures also have access to certain training materials if they have written agreements with us.

Collaboration

We participate in a wide range of forums to help improve practices across the industry and around the world. We have representatives on more than 40 committees and forums related to health, safety, and security in groups that include:

  • Energy Institute: The Energy Institute is a professional membership body that provides training, shares knowledge, and supports energy professionals globally.
  • International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP): The IOGP works to improve safety, environmental, and social performance in our industry.
  • American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM): AFPM represents the refiners and manufacturers, with a focus on industry safety and policy.
  • Texas Chemical Council: The Texas Chemical Council promotes the interests of the industry in Texas, emphasizing safety and environmental responsibility.
  • American Petroleum Institute (API): API is the primary trade association for the oil and natural gas industry in the United States, with focused safety efforts that include the Onshore Safety Alliance and the Center for Offshore Safety.
  • Construction Users Roundtable: This group addresses issues related to safety, labor relations, and productivity in the construction industry.
  • Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS): CCPS develops and promotes best practices in process safety management for the chemical and petroleum industries.
“We’re known for excellent execution and the discipline of our processes at ExxonMobil, and those are the same things that drive our most-responsible-operator mindset when it comes to the safety of our people.”
Darren Swisher
Darren Swisher, MS CSP
Member: IOGP Safety Committee, IOGP Fatality and Permanent Impairment Expert Group, IOGP Control of Work Expert Group, AFPM Safety Committee, AFPM Walk the Job Steering Committee, Global Benchmarking Group Safety Team
Darren is our Global Safety & Risk Operations Support Manager who leads our personnel safety efforts and works across our operations to improve safety performance.

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    FOOTNOTES:

    1. Industry benchmark: The International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) safety performance indicators and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) Report of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses are the Upstream and Downstream industry benchmarks, respectively. IOGP safety performance indicators data converted from incidents per 1 million work hours to incidents per 200,000 work hours. Performance data may include rounding. ExxonMobil analysis of data published by AFPM and IOGP. 2024 industry data not available at time of publication.
    2. ExxonMobil LTIR based on full-year performance data for each year noted as of March 12, 2025. Performance data may include rounding. Incidents include injuries and illnesses. ExxonMobil workforce includes employees, contractors, and recent acquisitions (Denbury data beginning November 2, 2023 and Pioneer data beginning May 3, 2024).