V.Ships Manpower says that crews face added burdens and better leadership skills will help ease tensions at sea.

Plenty is said about improving on-board systems to enhance operational efficiency but Lawrie Campbell believes a better investment may be in training and leadership.

Campbell is chief executive of Glasgow-based V.Ships Manpower Services, a wing of the world's largest shipmanagement company.

V.Ships has a massive 18,000 seafarers on contracts and says it is increasingly focussing on providing a better service for its "core" crewing activities at a time when owners face cost pressures.

Campbell says technology needs to continually move forward but senior officers face a growing workload of administrative, systems entry and management responsibilities. It is reaching the point where instead of inventing another system, control mechanism or spread sheet to complete, the industry should focus on behaviour, attitude and cultural issues.

"It probably goes without saying that we will get a better investment [return] in areas of training and leadership," said Campbell.

The manpower boss, who spent seven years in the Royal Marines and another seven with an independent recruitment company working in the oil-and-gas sector, points to a conversation with a couple of former Shipping Corp of India (SCI) employees who said, when they began their careers, there were 73 crew on board a VLCC. Today, the figure is 23.

Lower, modern-day manning levels means demands on board are much greater and "we cannot swamp people with systems", says Campbell.

He says V.Ships continually reviews the content of its mandatory training courses and over the past 12 months, it has decided to make five of its "key" crewing centres state of the art, delivering what he describes as "full resource crew management courses".

The emphasis is on the bridge and engine-room teams and how they interact.

Campbell said: "The focus is really on the softer skills and team building rather than another technical course." V.Ships's training organisation is funded through agreements involving vessels under full management.

"It is the owners' money, we are entrusted with it," said Campbell. "We have had to get better during the past 18 months at where and how we direct these resources." He says that while it is important to talk about numbers of training courses in very specific areas of safety management, "we [also] want to look at the human factor and build up our crew-resources management capability".

Meanwhile, all owners say that in the current climate less money is available for crewing and training. Campbell says V.Ships has undergone enormous internal changes in the past year to improve efficiency and drive out operational costs.

Campbell, for example, has been working to what he describes as very tight timeframes running a series of strategy and systems-implementation workshops for 150 managers involved in crewing.

"When we knew the economy was not looking great toward the end of 2008, we decided to focus our efforts almost entirely on ensuring our shipmanagement and crewing services were robust," said Campbell. "We feel in 2009 we had a good year in these core areas." He says V.Ships took on some large accounts, especially specialised vessels including a lot of chemical and oil products tankers. The most high-profile move was the acquisition of International Tanker Management (ITM).

During the year, V.Ships increased its pool of tanker officers by 19% and overall on-board positions under contract by more than 1,000 to around 18,000.