An international oil and gas company is operating in different locations in the world, including a number of platforms in the North Sea. One of the requirements they have is that whenever an emergency occurs on the rig, they want to have a professional capacity to inform the family of the employees.

After consultation with Forth Global the client determined the following operating principles for their Family Support strategy:

• Family Support capacity should be a mix of inhouse capacity, complemented with external capacity on retainer. This is because potentially the number of family members to be contacted exceeds the staff working on shore.
• Family Support is strategic, it goes beyond delivering the message. Family may have valuable input and can make or break a successful outcome of the crisis strategy.

Forth Global proposed a set of solutions that fitted the needs of the client. First of all, we entered into a Family Support Assistance contract where Forth Global has a pool of Family Support Officers available for the client, to be deployed in several hours. Secondly, we reviewed the Family Support documentation to add the strategic value of Family Support into the existing documents. We also trained the internal Family Support Officers within the organization. All this to create a good balance between ownership and internal capacity of the client, while simultaneously giving the client access to additional capacity when needed.

The way the cooperation took place is great to see, Forth Global saw the client grow in their capacity.