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What’s Causing the Increase in Mental Health & Well-being Challenges for our Maintenance Workforce?

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Mental health continues to be a major issue in the workplaces of our MAINSTREAM community. This rated as the #1 challenge in the annual MAINSTREAM State of Asset Management Report. Many companies reported that the issue is greater than it’s ever been and getting worse. Poor mental health can have a significant impact on an individual’s health, attendance, performance, engagement, and safety. Several Causes The significant increase in mental health and wellbeing challenges over the last few years are a result of job insecurity, high job demand and pressure to perform, lack of empathy and understanding from leadership, and the imbalance between effort and reward. But by far the biggest reasons for this increase, according to the research, are the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and relentless organisational change. Ongoing effects of COVID-19 During the pandemic, whether it was mining, manufacturing, power generation or transport, almost all companies applied the strategy of having critical operational and maintenance people working on site in A and B teams, whilst non-critical operations, management and corporate functions completed much of their work from home. After two years, the us vs them divide that often existed between operational teams and corporate teams has become amplified. Due to people being sick from Covid or having to isolate because of close contact restrictions, the long and sustained hours and overtime required, has changed some organisation’s approach to reliability and equipment maintenance. Examples include choosing to run machines to failure because it was a better strategy. Another … Continue reading →

The State of Asset Management Report 2022

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Since 1995, the MAINSTREAM research team has polled our community of thousands of Maintenance, Reliability and Asset Management professionals to glean distinctive insights into the barriers and challenges faced, and the opportunities on offer, in their quest for achieving asset management excellence. The findings from our surveys help leaders, teams, and individuals to understand best practices, compare their companies’ performance and working environment to those inside and outside their industry, and make informed and effective decisions. Having fuelled this special Community for 26 years, this is by far the most interesting State of Asset Management Report created for you yet. It captures insights from 255 like-minded folk, representing a range of regions, industries, and asset management maturity. Insights leading the way are: Unpreparedness for the asset management workforce of the future Significant increase in mental health and wellbeing across asset intensive industries Misalignment between Asset Strategy and Enterprise Strategy Overwhelmed by the enormous amount of data collected Under-appreciating and misunderstanding the Reliability Engineer Download the State of Asset Management Report for 2022 below. … Continue reading →

Developing Women Into Operational Leadership in Asset Management

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Globally the face of the workforce is changing. Now more that ever, there is an upswell of awareness and support around improving gender equality in every workplace. In the asset management space – an industry that has historically employed an almost entirely male workforce – the shift towards creating opportunities for women is challenging. But some companies are making great strides towards gender equality and are discovering that greater diversity of thought and style will surely drive Australian industry towards world’s best practice. Jess Torpey, Transformation Implementation Leader, Operations Services at Aurizon will be presenting at Mainstream Conference 2018. As a female business and journalism major employed to write speeches for our senior execs, Jess never imagined that she’d find herself in a front-line leadership role in a heavy haul rail workshop. One day, she was enjoying life in Brisbane’s CBD and the next she was the team leader of the Traction and Machine shop, one hour from Brisbane, leading a team of 12 tradies and apprentices. Opportunities to take a leadership role don’t come along very often so she was keen to make the most of it and as daunting as it appeared initially, it was the best thing that happened to her career. Jess is well positioned to share her insights into how companies can use their existing people and by simply placing the right people in the right jobs, with a little lateral thinking, can impact their businesses and the lives of their staff positively. We chatted … Continue reading →

Risk Management is Boring: Brain Hacks to Protect Your Business

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One challenge for many businesses is the wonderfully unsexy world of risk management. Due to the overwhelming optimism of entrepreneurs, stopping the bad things happening can often be overlooked. However, when you let people rip you off, exploit your weaknesses or you just leave a small door open to be manipulated, it can be fatal, says Daniel Murray CEO of Empathic Consulting. Daniel gave the keynote address to over 400 people at Mainstream Conference 2019 in Melbourne, demonstrating the incredible power that empathy has to build business relationships in our digitally focused but disconnected age. In this article he gives us a different way to look at risk management and shares some ways to encourage people to engage their “moral compass” in order to self-regulate risk. It Turns Out We’re All Cheaters There were a number of interesting experiments conducted by professor Dan Ariely from MIT regarding cheating. They asked people to complete a challenging test, then they give them the answers to self-mark their effort, walk to the front of the room and shred their paper before telling the administrator the number of correct answers they correctly answered. They then receive payment for each correct answer. So, do people cheat? What was interesting was not that some people cheated, but that all people consistently cheated. Ariely had tampered with the shredder so they could check and indeed, almost all people cheated, not by a lot, but on average they increased the number of correct answers from 3 to 4 … Continue reading →

Mainstream Conference 2019 Highlights

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2019 has been an exciting year for asset management. Technology implementations have hit their stride with many companies successfully striking the balance between human effort and technological innovations. Strategy is being underpinned by a strong asset management mindset, elevating the important work we do to the board level. And it’s all being tied together by the human element. As ever, without alignment of our people, nothing will cut through. These were some key themes we heard during the presentations at this year’s Mainstream Conference, a unique event for maintenance, reliability and asset management professionals. The annual event, which has been running for 24 years, brought together over 400 asset management professionals from 140 companies to hear the latest in asset management strategy, innovation and technology. Here is a summary of key themes and session highlights from Mainstream Conference 2019. Strategy Goes Deeper than Asset Management Our Mainstream community were eager to hear how companies are fostering an Asset Management mindset within their organisations and aligning this with their overall company objectives. We heard from several leaders in this area who shared their strategies for transformation. Anna Wiley, BHP’s Head of Asset Management, gave us a view inside their global Maintenance Centre of Excellence (MCoE), an initiative which has successfully moved BHP from 40 separate maintenance organisations to one globally connected community. “The MCoE represents a fundamentally new approach to maintenance for BHP,” Anna said. The  emphasis has been on concentrating efforts, applying standardised and repeatable processes, employing mathematical and data … Continue reading →

AGL’s Energy Efficiency Journey: Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

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AGL were unknowingly losing $20m per year on fuel costs by operating with many feedwater heaters out of service. For years individuals had attempted to get them back into service because they felt it was the right thing to do. But consistency brewed complacency. AGL used human-centred design techniques to identify the root cause – we’re not talking technical root cause, rather behavioural root cause. Then they started on an ambitious journey to change the culture. Sarah Hannah, Head of Asset Systems (Acting) at AGL Energy will be outlining the astonishing results achieved in her session at Mainstream Conference 2019. Here she tells us why you should be focusing on culture transformation instead of initiatives, and outlines how they have engaged AGLs leadership to come on their transformation journey. Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast How many initiatives have we seen started in our companies which seemingly evaporate with no real value delivered. As asset management professionals, we are continually delivering initiatives to improve our asset management systems, our asset performance, our maintenance strategies… the list goes on. How much of the time that we spend delivering these initiatives do we focus on ‘how’ we are delivering rather than ‘what’ we are delivering? And do we know ‘why’ we are delivering it? “People are our most important asset and bringing them along on the asset management journey is not an option, it’s essential.” The phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ talks to the fact that if you aren’t identifying the … Continue reading →

Realising the Benefits of Asset Optimisation

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The field of asset management and asset investment has moved into the spotlight. No longer on the fringes of business awareness, it has become a top strategic objective for organisations of all sizes. A key driver of this change is the spreading belief that optimising asset investment plans will deliver tangible benefits to organisations as well as the adoption of ISO 55000 across the globe. However, these drivers also create the challenge of living up to expectations as new, risk-based asset management practices are implemented and then supporting technologies to achieve the standards. Companies can meet that challenge by forecasting two futures, one based on how the organisation used to make decisions, and one based on the principles of advanced asset management. Push Toward ISO 55000 Compliance ISO 55000 stakes out two primary areas of benefit, financial performance and stakeholder value. Some of these benefits have direct dollar impacts, while others such as reputation and social responsibility are harder to quantify, though they clearly link to asset management activities. Most of the benefits are reliant on the hypothesis that an organisation can make better decisions by using risk as the basis for optimisation. This includes balancing short- and long-term goals, managing risk, improving sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness. All these benefits require an investment in process, data and software. The list of benefits from ISO 55000 may be long and seem obvious to asset managers, but eventually the investment in processes, people and technology will have to be justified to executives … Continue reading →

Sydney Water’s Data Strategy Makes the Insights Flow

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For Sydney Water’s five million customers, quality and satisfaction can simply mean pouring a clean glass of drinking water. But behind this seemingly basic concept, there’s a complex network of assets that are all underpinned by one thing: Data. Ahead of her session at Mainstream Conference, Tammy Falconer, Head of Asset Knowledge at Sydney Water, outlines the key steps they have taken to build a trusted data strategy and the benefits that are flowing onto their valued customers. Drowning in Data? Not at Sydney Water It’s easy to take for granted that Sydney-siders have access to some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, and that our wastewater disappears, just like that. Behind the scenes, there’s a huge number of assets delivering these services. We’ve been building and maintaining these assets for over 130 years to help make Sydney a liveable city and we’re passionate and proud of our role in shaping the lifestyle of Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra for generations to come. With a long history, our older assets can provide unique challenges, particularly our underground assets where we don’t have easy access to the asset to verify the accuracy of the data. We need to take a targeted and cost-effective approach to improve the data quality of existing assets and at the same time ensure that any new data meets the standards we require. Focusing on Data Foundations We’ve taken a business capability approach to maximising the value of our data focusing on … Continue reading →

7 Habits Of Highly Successful Losers

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At the last Olympic Games, just over 92% of the 10,960 athletes who took part did not win a medal. Except for the odd draw, every time two sporting teams meet, one will lose. Thousands of books and articles are written about how to win, yet seemingly none on losing. Strange when one considers how regularly losing happens. As a recent World T20 loser, Paddy Upton knows a thing or two about losing, and he’s not afraid to admit it. Paddy is a world-leading expert in human performance and an international cricket coach. His disruptive leadership approach propelled the Indian team to become World Test Cricket Champions in 2010 and to win the 2011 ICC World Cup. But it hasn’t been all gold medals and triumph along the way. His view is that losing, and more importantly losing successfully, is an important part of building a winning culture. Ahead of his session at Mainstream Conference 2019, he shares seven traits that highly successful losers have in common, and how you can use these as a springboard for success. Successful Losing As a recent World T20 loser, I thought I’d write about losing successfully. Not so that we can become good losers or better at losing, but so that we can optimise losing as a springboard out of the disappointment and back towards success. Let’s start by looking at what effective losing is NOT. It is not acting pissed off, walking around kicking things or throwing your bat when you come … Continue reading →