This article will serve as the final of three articles that were written in response to the input provided for the Co-op Forum for the April 2024 edition of RE Magazine. The question: How has risk assessment evolved in the last decade?
In Part 1, we focused on the danger of separating operations and safety and the need to evolve to a place where we simply “operate safely”. We also discussed moving from a compliance-based approach that is focused on checking the boxes, to a standard of care where humility is established by leadership to provoke a great culture of safety. In part 2, we reflected on coaching vs catching, people as part of the solution, and proper response to human error. In Part 3, we will address the SIF issues in our industry:
“Even with all of that, risk management of serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) may have evolved most of all as it’s really helped us in Ohio to re-focus on the most important things. We now understand that miniscule DART rates and recordable rates can be setting someone up for catastrophic failure because the absence of injury doesn’t necessarily imply the presence of safety. Maybe we need to redefine a ‘high performing cooperative’ since we now know it's a lot less about our DART Rate and a lot more about proactive capacities that produce open conversation. And this all starts with the understanding that humans make mistakes, culture drives behavior, and our response to failure matters.”
SERIOUS INJURIES AND FATALITIES (SIF) RISK MANAGEMENT
One of the staple tools in the world of safety was developed in 1931 by Herbert William Heinrich when he developed what has become known as “Heinrich’s Pyramid.” The theory addressed five categories of actions and incidents in a hierarchical fashion: unsafe acts, near misses, minor accidents, serious accidents, and fatalities, correspondingly. The theory is that if the number of incidents at the bottom of the pyramid are reduced that the number of incidents at the top of the pyramid will coincide and also be reduced.
However, safety professionals first began questioning the accuracy of the theory 25 years ago when numbers began falling at the bottom of the pyramid, but the number of SIFs at the top stayed static. Upon analysis, these safety professionals found that it’s much more complex than a simple equation or theory. Furthermore, the theory tended to cause people to focus on minor incidents rather than SIF incidents, further exacerbating the situation. It is important to note that the pyramid theory does still hold true in some situations.
This single fact has brought a renewed focus on SIF incidents in many different industries. In the electric utility industry, the electric cooperatives and Quanta (union contractors) are at the forefront of this movement. Quanta created a strategy that included the word “STKY” (S**t that Kills You) for workers to easily recognize when they need a backup plan, and cooperatives have implemented the powerful Commitment to Zero Contacts Phase 2 program where work practices are discussed directly with field workers and frontline leaders. In these meetings, workers have generally been transparent about what is happening in the field, and issues are able to be addressed, with the hopes that the leaders themselves, along with their crews, will be the agents of change.
While that has seen much success, the conversation needs to stay alive in order for your Commitment to Zero Contacts program (or whatever SIF program you are using) to be effective every day of the year. An environment has to be created where it’s safe to talk about how I messed up last night. It must be safe to talk about reclosers that are hard to get to for that visible open, grounding the load side even if it’s only one house, equipment needed to install grounds with extendo sticks in rough territory, equipment grounding, dielectric footwear, and other difficult conversations.
I was recently in a safety meeting with an arrogant young lineman snickering at different things in the meeting and it just made me so sad because we know that arrogance leads to SIFs more than any other single factor. Maybe it doesn’t make the root cause list, but it’s almost always there at the very bottom. I love to see when co-ops hire for character first because it’s hard to teach that at COLT. Humility requires acknowledgement that I might be wrong, and that’s exactly who we need in the field leading our crews to bring our troops back home safely every day.
VIEWING INJURY RATES THROUGH THE PROPER LENS
Injury rates such as TRIR and DART are often a direct reflection of culture, and we have seen our co-ops in Ohio make amazing headway over the last 20 years which coincides with a ton of effort and finances you’ve invested in your safety programs. It worked! Congratulations! That is fantastic. But we just need to make sure that we don’t make the same mistake that many have: mainly focus on the slips, trips, and falls when we still have guys out in the field working downed conductors “as hot” or taking other life-saving shortcuts. That’s how we watch Heinrich’s Pyramid fail when we see our injury rates decline, and SIFs remain steady.
Furthermore, it is important to recognize when our linemen are most susceptible to taking such life-saving shortcuts: IN EXTREME CONDITIONS. Commitment to Zero Contacts Phase 2 woke me up to the fact that we still have a lot of work to do in our state and it’s important for every one of us to understand it only takes one bad decision to shortcut a task and one setup for disaster to strike.
So, what do we do with these awesome injury rates? And what do we NOT do with these awesome injury rates? First of all, it’s important to ask the question if we really do have awesome injury rates or if things are just not being reported. I was reading one study where they found a number of contractors doing all they could to suppress reporting in order to keep their injury rates low so they could gain more contracts. Do you encourage reporting of all kinds?
WHAT NOT TO DO: Don’t make injury rates the main focus! Our goal should be for employees to report every type of incident, including injury-related ones. When we hold up the banner of 5 years without a lost time incident and make the celebration over that, who’s going to want to be the one who breaks that streak? Not me.
WHAT TO DO: If the rates have trended well, acknowledge it and let your workers know you appreciate them working safely. Period. Then take it as one (and only one) sign that you’re making headway in your culture and then keep an eye on it. If it’s not trending well, ask your safety coordinator why that is. There should be solid data and analysis to break it all down to let you know exactly what is happening and if we should be concerned about certain things or not.
But mostly what we should be doing is to celebrate the presence of safety rather than the absence of injury! In other words, there should be some form of recognition in place for such things as great job briefings, leading in-house safety meetings, mentoring apprentices, near miss reporting, and solid crew observations where they were caught doing the right thing. How are you reinforcing positive behaviors and also identifying unsafe behaviors?
When is the last time you had a safety breakfast where you celebrated these leading indicators (proactive safety) that will get them home at the end of the day? When is the last time you talked to your board about something outstanding that one of your employees did for your safety program and the board president had them come to a board meeting to recognize their efforts?
If someone would ask you what you believe to be the single most important thing in your safety program, what would you say that is? To me, that single most important thing is open communication where it’s safe to be transparent. And this communication must occur in all different kinds of ways. One on one conversations, in-house safety meetings, E&O discussions, and any other avenue you can think of. Open communication, though it may turn negative at times, gives the co-op leaders a chance to make corrections and adjustments in real time on a proactive basis. And what more could we ask for than continual improvement of our safety programs with engaged employees?
