For non-specializing safety professionals, electrical work is often highly mysterious. Electrical operations and maintenance leaders, along with field personnel, often find even knowledgeable safety professionals to be somewhat unrelatable and vice versa. Unfortunately, this reality, or perceived reality, frequently leads to ineffective use of the safety professional that falls far short of the potential benefit to companies in the electrical field. This article strives to foster understanding between safety professionals and electrical operations and maintenance leaders, along with field personnel, to maximize the potential of the relationship for reducing risk. In short, how can safety professionals and field personnel learn to be on the same page and make every day on the job safer?
Questions, questions, and more questions
Effective safety professionals ask a plethora of questions when conducting a work-site visit. This approach is especially true in the electrical arena. Often, a particular question serves dual purposes. The safety professional wants to know if activities comply with company procedures and regulations. He also wants to ascertain whether employees understand safe work practices and what is required, along with whether safe work practices are generally followed (i.e., beyond that particular job). Finally, safety professionals ask questions so they can learn and better understand the work conducted by those whom they support as well as verify that program procedures and safe work practices are functioning effectively.
Another reason safety professionals ask questions is to brainstorm solutions. A safety professional may observe a situation that he thinks could be handled more safely; however, he has no definitive solution. In these situations, he may ask whether the task has been performed differently in the past or if the employee has any ideas as to how it can be done more safely. It is not uncommon for an employee to recall a safer approach to the task during such a conversation. These questions aren’t meant to put employees in the “hot seat” or throw field personnel under the bus. Quite the opposite: This approach is about finding a safe solution that works in the environment and could be replicated by others.
Safety professionals also ask questions for which they already know the answer. This is generally done to gauge the effectiveness of the applicable company procedures, safe work practices, and worker training. For example, they may ask an employee how he will perform test-before-touch. Because the gear is low voltage, he may already know the employee will need to use a contact meter rather than only using a proximity meter to ensure the absence of voltage. Nonetheless, such a question is an opportunity to both prompt the employee to do the correct thing and allow the employee to talk about how he does his job and share knowledge. Universally, craftspeople and electrical technicians take pride in their work and the specialized knowledge required to perform it. This approach typically results in both individuals feeling good about the interaction.
Inexperienced safety professionals in the electrical context
Unfortunately, some safety professionals supporting electrical workers are not as effective as they would be supporting other disciplines and craftspeople. This challenge may be the result of ignorance due to lack of experience, education, formal training, a misunderstanding of the role, a company’s approach to safety that envisions a team of safety cops enforcing rules, or, less commonly, a character flaw.
On large construction projects, for example, where safety people may be responsible for the safety of cranes and rigging, fall protection, excavations, hot work, confined space operations, and mobile equipment, electricians or technicians often feel isolated from frequent interactions with safety professionals because they know that safety folks either do not understand their work or are too busy to focus on it. They may have casual conversations with safety folks, but they generally do not regularly share job specifics and/or worker challenges. This result is unfortunate because a cognizant and knowledgeable safety professional can be of great use in preventing injuries. Safety professionals have the responsibility to learn and arm themselves with the capacity to be effective. However, electrical operations, construction, and maintenance leaders, along with field personnel, can benefit from explaining certain concepts and jargon to less experienced safety professionals. They should view interactions with a safety professional as opportunities to develop the safety professional for future interactions with others in the company, resulting in an increased ability to identify opportunities for improvement and ultimately reduce risk.
Safety professionals who seek to expand their electrical knowledge, enjoy visiting job sites, and are receptive to technicians, craftspeople, and company leaders should be retained and cultivated.
Speaking the language
Successful safety professionals specializing in the electrical field will spend at least some of their own time reading to gain knowledge. Nonetheless, while they may initially feel ready and able after reading an article on diodes, rectifiers, and super doping, they may feel overwhelmed or completely lost when they make a site visit, unable to identify the equipment at which they are looking. While Khan Academy or Paul’s Online Math Notes may show them how to apply the mesh current method or how differential equations are applied to solve a simple resistor-capacitor-inductor circuit, they may not be able to read a one-line diagram well. While they should learn how to review diagrams, they may still be useful even before adding this ability to the knowledge arsenal. They will still be able to recognize ifone-line diagrams are available and being reviewed before switching and lockout/tagout (e.g., energy control) begin — an issue that persists in the industry. They will be able to talk to individual employees about whether anyone explained the switching procedure to them, if they walked down the job and reviewed all isolation points, where personal grounds are being applied, and the method used to verify that energy control occurred.
Safety folks need not fully understand all technical aspects of electrical work to understand and track whether procedures are followed and whether individual employees are informed and understand how to work safely. Tracking these factors on a large scale — and presenting the data to operations and maintenance leaders — is an invaluable service. To best utilize data presenting opportunities for improvement and reduction of risk, operations and maintenance leaders must present it to their employees in a way that conveys how important it is to them as leaders rather than how important it is to the safety professional. Then, they must follow up to ensure that improvement has occurred. For a safety program to be successful, leaders and frontline workers must understand the personal risk that everyone takes on the job and be committed to safe work that gets them and their teammates home safely each night. Safety performance is about real people and lives, not just checking boxes for a field report.
The most valuable safety professionals constantly advance their knowledge. Field personnel are an invaluable asset in this regard. A few areas that often cause confusion between electrical maintenance technicians and safety professionals as well as between clients and electrical contractors include terminologies such as “primary” and “secondary,” “load” and “line” sides, and even the term “breaker.”
While the terms “primary” and “secondary” are associated with transformers, in practice, they are also sometimes used to refer to the load and line sides of equipment. Some safety professionals and even electricians may immediately begin thinking about transformers when they hear the words “primary” or “secondary,” even though the speaker may simply be talking about the load and line sides — or upstream and downstream of a particular piece of equipment. On a somewhat related note, safety people who are new to companies specializing in electrical work may only think of isolation and lockout from a mechanical perspective. In other words, they are more accustomed to isolation and lockout of only the load side to isolate a downstream motor or other equipment from its source of electricity rather than isolation of a breaker to test the breaker, which would require isolation on both the load and line sides.
Some safety professionals will use the word “breaker” to describe a motor control center (MCC) bucket that contains not only a breaker, but also other important components such as relay circuits, contactors, and coils. Additionally, they may refer to an MCC room as an “MCC,” when, in reality, an MCC room contains multiple MCCs.
Operations and maintenance leaders can make their safety professionals more value-adding by coaching them on the terminology and encouraging field personnel to coach and interact with them as well.
Welcoming feedback and challenge
Safety people are accustomed to employees and leaders challenging what they advocate. The mere fact that challenge occurs is an indicator that leaders and employees are at least cognizant of what is required. Leaders and employees should not become laconic due to the arrival of a safety person. Rather, they should freely express how the company’s safety policies are impractical or create greater hazards. Because effective safety people recognize that the best knowledge comes from those performing the work and utilizing the associated safety programs, procedures, and work practices, they welcome feedback and explanations of how current policies or procedures may not work well, along with how they can be improved.
Experienced safety people know that impractical policies or procedures will not keep employees safe because, in many instances, they will simply be disregarded. They strive to develop safe work practices that are workable and as simple as possible because that is the best way to gain worker buy-in and thereby reduce risk and strengthen the health of their programs.
Planning, boots on the ground, and program development/evaluation
Having safety professionals is just the beginning. Knowing how and where to best use them is a separate challenge. For electrical contractors with employees spread out over what may be a large geographical area, it may be especially challenging. Contracts often require an on-site safety professional depending on the number of workers. While this requirement is triggered by a minimum number of workers and increases as the number of workers grows, it may be true that actual risk is greater on smaller projects. Logically, on larger projects with more workers, the likelihood of an injury generally is probably greater. However, the likelihood of a life-altering injury or fatality from shock, arc flash, and/or arc blast may be lower due to the involvement and attention of more supervisory personnel. On the other hand, small jobs tend to take a less formal approach, which may result in the skipping of important steps in establishing and/or verifying an electrically safe working condition, such as donning shock and arc flash PPE while testing for absence of voltage. Therefore, it may be advantageous for safety professionals to visit smaller jobs to ensure required processes are followed.
The significance of planning for safety cannot be overstated. Salespersons or estimators may not fully understand all the critical risks that exist on a job and fail to include the cost of the tools or time to prepare and perform work safely. For example, an aerial lift that allows employees to reach access points for applying personal grounds may be necessary to avoid employees standing awkwardly on a ladder with a hot stick holding a heavy set of grounds overhead in a substation. If this cost is not considered initially, this may result in less profit and the client may be impacted by delays. This type of frustration can be avoided by involving safety professionals early in the planning process.
Electrical contractors are often asked to do work because the customer does not have the expertise or staff resources. Sometimes, this fact leads to customers requesting that electrical contractors open a breaker with an incident energy level greater than the rating of available personal protective equipment (PPE) or requesting that contractors enter confined spaces that cannot be fully de-energized without a full outage. Telling a customer “no,” even for safety reasons, can be uncomfortable and requires courage. It can sometimes create tension in the relationship. Safety professionals can be utilized in these situations to help facilitate communications and educate the customer regarding why the task is outside the contractor’s risk tolerance. Such a scenario presents a great opportunity to deliver ideas regarding alternative options for completing the work or articulate what equipment changes could be made in the future to better mitigate the hazards.
Program development, implementation, maintenance, auditing, training, and improvement are the bread-and-butter of safety people. This article has emphasized that safety people need not be the most technically adept to add value. Compliance program stewardship and improvement is a perfect example. Safety people develop programs and improve processes in many areas by promoting conversation, talking to experts, and talking to boots-on-the-ground personnel. Their specialty is the integration of ideas and work practices into something that works on real job sites and can be replicated for future projects. Leaders in the electrical field can and should use them in this manner.
In conclusion, effective safety professionals in the electrical field can greatly assist in the reduction of risk for their companies, and their support can be maximized by operations and maintenance leaders and personnel who are willing to answer questions, ask tough questions, and freely share knowledge.
Travis D. Livermore is the corporate safety manager at Shermco Industries in Dallas. Travis has worked in environmental, health, and safety (EHS) management for more than seven years and has several years of experience in the legal field. He can be reached at [email protected].
Jeremy Presnal is vice president EHS & workforce development at Shermco Industries. Jeremy has been working as an EHS professional for more than 18 years with experience in power generation, petrochemical, construction, and manufacturing companies. He can be reached at [email protected].
