Many people who have not yet reached mid-career believe they can curry favor with their supervisor or their employer by cutting “unnecessary” corners to get the job done faster. But a good supervisor or a good employer is likely to be more alerted than impressed by unusually fast job completions.
Consider a few situations:
- You do a residential job. The customer complained about a receptacle that seemed to be hot to the touch. You found a loose ground wire, tightened it down, settled the bill, and left. Later that day, your company has to send someone back out because the problem still exists. Your company eats the service call fee and loses the resource availability for other jobs.
- You’re a maintenance electrician. You pride yourself on turning PMs around quickly. So you skip steps like checking belt tension (the belt looks okay) and rush through motor lubrication instead of waiting for all of the old grease to drop out of the drain hole. Consequently, you leave a wake of equipment failures that dwarf in cost your wages.
- You work for an industrial services firm that does breaker maintenance for one of its major clients. You decide to not bother cleaning the contact surfaces because that was done the last time. You take a few other shortcuts to speed up the work and are pleased to let the customer know energization can be restored 20 minutes sooner. You actually don’t save them anything, because this time and its attendant resources are already allocated. But your sloppiness causes 90 minutes of blackout and production interruption a week later — and your firm loses that contract.
So from the financial end, this shortcutting to please your employer doesn’t work. So there’s no real incentive to do it, the incentive is an illusion. The same mentality that produces subpar work also produces safety hazards. Any good supervisor and any good employer will make allowances for the fact that up and comers don’t have twenty years of experience (and training). They will grade you not on how well you can pretend you completed the work, but on how well you performed the expected work to the standards they set. They expect you to be methodical, careful, diligent, and thorough. They do not want you generating callbacks, downtime, or area-wide blackouts. They certainly don’t want you rushing your way into creating an unsafe situation for yourself or others.
Some people start out in the industry with the idea that you have a certain job to do and on top of that are the safety requirements that get in the way. They believe that safety and productivity are mutually exclusive goals — or at least must be balanced against each other. This idea is often true in slices of time taken out of the context of the entire job and out of context of the company’s mission. But on less microscopic basis, it is patently false.
The reality is that when you work methodically, you work in a much more efficient manner than someone who wings it. Completing set procedures for troubleshooting instead of fixing just one problem you happened to spot means you can walk away knowing the problem is solved. And there will be no callback. Callbacks cost money and damage reputations, so eliminating them is always better than risking them.
The job briefing is one of those things that to some people wastes time. So they fast forward through it without being fully engaged. But it is hugely more efficient for a crew to have had a solid job briefing so they know what is expected of them, what the job is about, what problems they may encounter, and so on than for them to be continually asking questions as the work is done — or worse, not asking questions and making incorrect guesses. During a job briefing, pay full attention and ask questions.
Another area where Johnny B. Fast invites injuries is ladder use. If the ladder isn’t tall enough, you can “save time” by standing above the “don’t step past this rung” rung instead of getting the correct ladder. You can also “save time” by using the ladder feet you have instead of getting the correct ones. But why court danger in this way? No good supervisor or employer is going to reward you for this, and they may just fire you. If you are that careless with your own safety, what conclusions will they draw about the work they are trusting you to do correctly?
Being organized and methodical is the correct way to save time. Scope out the job properly to eliminate wasted trips to the shop or truck for some part or tool you should already have with you. Properly communicate to your teammates, customer, and other stakeholders about what the job entails and what safety measures must be in place (e.g., lockout/tagout) before commencing the work. Treat the work as a one-shot deal — not something where there’s a free do-over. To get it right the first time, you must take the time to be thorough with every aspect including the safety aspects — with no shortcuts.
