KAZENERGY-KIOGE
TCO: During this pandemic, the health and safety of our workforce and uninterrupted production are of utmost importance.
Rzabek Artygaliev, Tengizchevroil’s (TCO) General Manager for Policy, Government and Public Affairs shares his thoughts in an interview with Petroleum magazine, about the work the company has done during the COVID-19 pandemic challenges, including TCO workforce vaccination program, as well as their efforts to provide credible and timely information to their workforce.
– Rzabek Dautovich, last year Tengizchevroil had to face a fundamentally new challenge for the entire oil and gas industry and for the global community – COVID-19 pandemic. With a team of several thousand rotators, the company managed to minimize the spread of the virus, maintain oil production and continue the large-scale expansion project. Could you share your experiences and how TCO managed this?
Indeed, last year we carried out unprecedented work to ensure the safety of our personnel, maintain uninterrupted production, and the progress of one of the largest capital projects in the world, the Future Growth Project – Wellhead Pressure Management Project (FGP-WPMP) in Tengiz.
The company had to urgently adapt its business activities to the challenges of the pandemic. For example, TCO quickly implemented safety measures including podding of personnel (separation of the staff in accommodations, transport and workplaces), social distancing, new requirements for personal protective equipment (PPE), PCR testing, and isolation prior to arrival for rotations. These measures remain in place to prevent the spread of the virus in Tengiz. At the same time, TCO continues to closely monitor the positivity rates among contractor companies’ personnel working in Tengiz and implements additional safety measures in accordance with these company’s positivity rates.
– Tengizchevroil is an industry leader in production digitalization. Was TCO able to use digital technology in the fight against coronavirus?
Since the first outbreak of the pandemic, TCO has been actively adopting digital technologies to combat the coronavirus. TCO quickly established new workflows and software tools in just a few weeks TCO has been able to understand key information on the pandemic, as well as the resources available. These digital tools make it possible to detect potential outbreaks of the virus at an early stage and to take timely measures to isolate infected personnel.
– Vaccination of employees is still anissue for many companies in Kazakhstan. How did you organize the vaccination process? How did you convince people to get vaccinated?
In early 2021, a Vaccination Strategy Development Group was established within the company, which included representatives of different departments. The Group's task was to find ways to provide TCO staff with the COVID-19 vaccine to protect their health and safety. It was a challenge. If you cast your mind back to the beginning of this year, COVID-19 vaccines were just being launched, and in fact they weren’t yet available in Kazakhstan. We realized that if we were going to provide vaccines to our workforce, we had to act quickly, as the global demand for vaccines was growing every day.
The Group set the workforce vaccination targets in alignment with the state vaccination program. During this time, TCO focused on putting in place a safe vaccination process, with the possibility of expanding vaccination centers. In addition the Group implemented a broad communications campaign to reach as many of the workforce as possible.
– Experts say that one of the main reasons that has slowed down the rate of vaccination in Kazakhstan is the dissemination of fake information and misinformation in the public domain. What did you do to counter this?
You are right. First of all, we had to develop a plan as quickly as possible on how we could reach our workers with accurate, credible and timely information, among the massive spread of fake news and misinformation. We started with the basics – analysis. We collected and conducted a detailed analysis of news about vaccines in media and social networks. Also, in January and February 2021, we conducted a survey among focus groups within the company, in order to understand their views on vaccines and identify their concerns regarding vaccination. The findings were crucial in designing our communication strategy and identifying the best channels to engage our workforce. We developed a communication campaign to encourage our employees to voluntarily get vaccinated by providing them with information about existing vaccines and the vaccination process. The key message delivered to our workforce was about the need to think about their own safety, their families, and colleagues.
At the same time, we continued to work closely with the Health Department of Atyrau oblast. The official channels of the Health Department reported to the public on the progress of TCO’s vaccination program, which helped to encourage others to be vaccinated. At least once a month, TCO notified the media on the progress:February – 14 people received the first dose of the vaccine, March – 1,400, April – 5,500, May – 10,000, September – more than 60,000 vaccinated with the first dose. Through these progress reports, residents of the region could follow the success of the vaccination program in Tengiz.
– Can you share specific communication campaign tools that worked most effectively?
We brought in medical professionals from across Kazakhstan to engage with our workers at COVID-19 vaccination-related townhalls. We worked with the government agencies to implement plans to ease isolation requirements for fully vaccinated workers, and we ran a communication campaign with TCO’s senior managers and colleagues who communicated their experiences of being vaccinated. Of course, we tracked the numbers on a daily basis and saw that all of these activities actually helped build momentum in our vaccination campaign.
In addition, the Group also launched a campaign through TCO’s employee Facebook platform called Workplace. The campaign called, "Why I got vaccinated", involved TCO employees, including members of the management team, sharing their perspectives on why they made the decision to get vaccinated. TCO held a series of virtual townhall meetings with the participation of thousands of personnel, including TCO employees, agency staff and business partners’ workforce. The topics focused on vaccine types and the vaccination process. We also held three townhalls with the Head of Medsupport.KZ, Dr. Botagoz Kaukenova, where we discussed vaccines and the importance of creating herd immunity, which can help fight against this virus.
– And what are the results of this campaign, without exaggeration, unique in scale?
As of September 28, more than 64,000 workers in Tengiz have been fully vaccinated. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who took part in the implementation of TCO vaccination program, as well as all those who took action to protect themselves, their loved ones and colleagues. I would also like to extend our appreciation to the Republic of Kazakhstan authorities for their unwavering support of our vaccination efforts.