You were pleased when your boss asked you to be the mentor for Greg, the new hire. He's technically sharp and personally easy going. He's one of those guys who “catches on quick.” But he doesn't take safety seriously and has started to replace that easygoing manner with annoyance with what he calls “silly rules.” He's started taking his hard hat off when on the production floor, citing as his rationale the obvious facts nothing is going to fall on him from above and the production workers aren't wearing hard hats.
The other day, he was yet again taking a voltage measurement with a DMM probe in each hand. When you told him this was incorrect, he replied that he was being paid to work not to waste time doing things in slow ways.
Should you back off on how much safety correction you give him? Doing so might make him feel less henpecked. But you would be sending the message that safety isn't so important after all, and you'd put him on the path to learning ingrained bad habits. The problem isn't that you are giving him guidance in correcting his safety mistakes. It's that he sees your guidance as just telling him rules — rules that don't make sense to him. He apparently feels those senseless rules slow him down, when he is a new employee trying to make a good impression on the company. To change Greg's perception, try an approach that stresses the why rather than the what.
When you are demonstrating something to Greg, explain the safety rule and why it matters before performing the task. For example, you want to show him the measurements needed to troubleshoot a particular piece of equipment. So before making the measurements, you might ask, “Greg, have you ever heard of an ionization trail?” Then discuss how that can result in an arc blast and how using meter probes in a particular way can create one. Then ask him, “So how would I prevent these two probes from creating an ionization trail?” Congratulate him when he gives the correct answer.
When Greg is doing something and you see an unsafe act, ask him to stop. “Greg, I stopped you because there is a safer way to do what you are doing. Can you tell me what that is? And can you tell me why the other way isn't safe?” This method is called the DuPont STOP method, and it's been used with dramatically good results.
What about the hard hat? For electrical workers on the production floor, it's usually true the hat isn't going to do much for protection from things falling from above; that danger is more of a construction site issue. But have Greg take a look at that hat. It has a front, not just a top. The bill of the hat sticks out enough to keep your face safely away from energized terminals, and the area above the bill protects your forehead from electric shock (which can occur even without direct contact).
For workers who are contractors, the hat also serves as immediate identification. Jim, Stan, and Laura all are wearing blue hard hats with their company logo, so at a glance they look like authorized contractors from that company. This other guy wandering around with no hard hat just might be a security risk.
