If three or fewer people in a typical maintenance shop or electrical services firm are chronic violators of your electrical safety plan or safety in general, you likely have a training or discipline problem with one or more of them. But if this is flipped around such that the same small percentage are the only ones complying or, even worse, nobody is complying, you have a systemic safety failure. And that system must be fixed.
Four places to look:
1. Procedures. These are sometimes confusing and unclear. Going through them to reduce wordiness (use fewer words to say the same thing), excise unnecessary statements, and generally tighten up the writing can make them far more readable and memorable. Don’t use software for this purpose; buy a reference such as “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White and apply what you learn. Very powerful for business letters and reports, too.
2. Training. Is your training process set up to do an information dump on people, or is it set up to ensure they understand and can demonstrate the safe and correct way to perform a given task or function? To make training really stick, you need to provide it in multiple ways. An explanation is good, but follow that with a quiz and it’s even better. Follow the quiz with an instructor demonstration, and the learning gets deeper still. Follow the instructor's demonstration with practice attempts and dry runs by the student, and the learning puts down deep roots.
3. PPE. An instrument tech at a nuclear power plant received a caustic burn on one arm while performing duties in a water treatment room. He was declared at fault for not wearing the protective “raincoat” that was kept in a locker in that room. But the 6-ft-tall man weighed 230 lb and the raincoat was a size medium. Not only that, it had a disgustingly rank odor akin to sweaty clothes pulled out of a gym bag two days after the last visit to the gym. Operators had not been wearing this outfit either, for the same reason.
At a plastics plant in Kentucky, the electrician who normally performed a certain task requiring insulated gloves wears a large glove and someone had re-ordered a small. He chose not to perform the task, and that had operational repercussions that were far from minor. Make sure the correct PPE is available and serviceable for those who need it.
4. Equipment. Test leads and step ladders arguably lead the pack here. If somebody wants to replace a set of test leads, make that easy. Don’t add friction to the process in a misguided effort to save money. Why would John use a step ladder that is too short, even though he knows better? Could it be he spent the last half hour walking cement floors to try to find the one he needs? Last time, it was squirreled away in a dark corner of the compressor room.
One way to reduce the hide-and-go-seek factor with ladders is to put an asset number on each one and require people to sign them in and out. Another way is to have a sufficient supply of ladders in the sizes most used. You can also look into different types of ladders, such as telescoping ladders,
