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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A focus on safety 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 fatalities, life-altering impacts, and other injuries.

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 and further enhance our protocols, making use of internationally recognized best practices.

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

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.


Performance

In 2025, we built on five consecutive years of industry-leading personnel safety performance with a Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) of 0.02 per 200,000 work hours.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

Image Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR)1,2

“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
ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO

Setting expectations for excellence

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 incorporate specific safety and health expectations in our contracts. In 2024, we reviewed and refreshed our OIMS Framework to include specific expectations related to our new Personnel Safety Management System (PSMS).

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

Our OIMS process meets the requirements of ISO 14001/45001 as 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) Report 621 and makes use of enhanced techniques and learning standards.

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Human performance

Human performance principles have been integrated into our operations and the processes and tools we use to perform our work. It starts with a simple principle: People make mistakes.

With that acknowledgement, we strive to understand when, how, and why mistakes are made - even when the appropriate processes and tools are in place - as a first step in enhancing the resilience of our facilities, systems, and people. These concepts are a key feature of OIMS and the way we maintain the safety and reliability of our operations, and how we learn and improve proactively from work and events if they occur. 

In March 2026, we jointly sponsored a Safety Collaboration Forum with others in the industry, with a specific focus on four key applications of human performance concepts including leadership, design, work execution, and learning. Centered on the new International Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) Report 810, members of the forum leveraged their community of practice to maintain focus on this issue and share practices that effectively embed human performance principles within their operations and across our industry. 

The growing body of knowledge on human factors and human performance in our industry is the result of many years of research and collaboration.


    Personnel Safety Management System

    In 2023, a cross-functional team at ExxonMobil completed a multiyear project to create an integrated, end-to-end safety standard for our operations. This new Personnel Safety Management System (PSMS) is designed to consistently deliver “safety in the moment.”

    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. Over 80% of our sites deployed PSMS by year-end 2025. Rollout is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. In addition, several progress checks are being conducted at each major operating site during the first two years post-deployment to verify that PSMS has been implemented effectively.

    Absence of incidents is, of course, a key measure of success. Leading indicators such as safeguard effectiveness, leader engagements, and worker engagements help us verify and validate the effectiveness of PSMS as it is further embedded into our practices.

    PSMS also features a heightened focus on eliminating life-changing injuries, or “life-altering injuries” (LAIs). These injuries are those with the highest potential to result in permanent impairment for those affected. The International Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP), in consultation with safety experts from across the industry, developed comprehensive definitions for these injuries in 2022.

    The system provides a suite of processes and tools 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.

    The key components of PSMS include:

    Personnel Safety Management System graphic

    Start to finish: Life-saving rules & actions and learning from work

    Life Saving Rules & Actions (LSRAs) are an important part of our PSMS. Our employees and contractors work together to execute the LSRAs for routine and non-routine work with higher-risk potential. LSRAs also work to enhance our understanding of key safeguards for 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.

    Continuous learning is key to continuous improvement, and we strive to learn from our work when incidents occur – and when they don’t. After Action Reviews (AARs) are a tool that help us to proactively learn in this space through a simple, informal discussion after the task is complete. AARs guide the team to discuss four key questions including what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, what were the differences, and what we can learn. The learnings help the team identify and embed improvements for the next time the work is performed.

    In addition, Verification and Validation (V&V) is a structured process we use to strengthen safety performance for tasks with high potential consequences. Verification confirms that safeguards – both physical and behavioral – are present, while validation ensures those safeguards are effective and functioning as intended.

    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 screenings, health surveys, well-being champions, resources to help employees with resiliency, and more. 

    See Investing in People for more information on how ExxonMobil supports our people.

    Workplace Security

    Protecting our people at all levels of the organization is our top priority in security. Our security programs are risk-based, flexible, responsive to the places we operate, and comply with applicable laws.

    Periodic security reviews at our sites address current and potential threats. Each assessment looks at factors such as:

    • Location.
    • Community relationships.
    • Criminal activity.
    • Political climate. 

    We monitor local conditions and keep detailed readiness plans for many risks, including:

    • Emergency response.
    • Evacuation and intruder response.
    • Bomb threat response.
    • Active shooter response.

    We provide tailored guidance for employees in higher-risk countries with challenging security environments. Our teams continue to work to improve our risk management methodologies, threat-assessment capabilities, and technical security management processes through drills, training programs, and industry forums.

    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 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.
    • Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS): CCPS develops and promotes best practices in process safety management for the chemical and petroleum industries.

    “We have integrated human performance principles into our new Personnel Safety Management System (PSMS) to help reduce the potential for life-altering injuries. By understanding human behavior and how work normally gets done, we are strengthening how we verify safeguards before and during work and building a learning culture focused on setting our people up for success.”

    Ben Manns
    ExxonMobil Personnel Safety & Human Performance Principal
    Member: American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) – Human & Organizational Performance Subgroup, American Petroleum Institute (API) - Human & Organizational Performance Subgroup, KrauseBell Group - Serious Injury and Fatality Center of Excellence, National Safety Council – Campbell Institute – Serious Injury and Fatality Committee

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      FOOTNOTES:

      1. Industry benchmark: 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. ExxonMobil analysis of data published by AFPM and IOGP. 2025 industry data not available at time of publication. Performance data may include rounding.
      2. Our workforce Lost-Time Incident Rate (LTIR) for 2020-2025 was 0.02 per 200,000 work hours, based on ExxonMobil 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 full-year performance data as of March 12, 2026. 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).