Unsafe Compliance: Why Checking Boxes Won’t Save Lives
In the nearly 15 years I’ve worked in the electric utility industry, I’ve witnessed life-altering injuries and helped to bury more than one coworker-turned-friend.
The toughest part for me to accept is knowing that most of those injuries and deaths were preventable. We were well-trained. Our compliance systems and paperwork were in place. Yet we still failed our brothers and sisters.
That reality should eat at all of us because our industry could have done better then – and we should be doing better now. We must face the truth that not all safety methods work as intended. Without adjusting our approach, elimination of serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) is nearly impossible.
The Illusion of Safety
One specific thing that keeps me up at night is the illusion of safety. Many of us are drowning in paperwork, but it is not meaningfully moving the needle in terms of SIF prevention.
Think about it. Nearly every incident we investigate circles back to either a lack of clarity or a lack of communication. Both are preventable forms of confusion. In allowing uncertainty to linger, we accept far greater risk than the cost of slowing down or stopping work to make things right.
Compliance is a science. It’s measurable, rigid, written in black and white. Regulatory and organizational rules tell us what’s permitted and what isn’t, what will pass an audit and what won’t. Safety, on the other hand, is an art. It’s dynamic, fluid, constantly changing. Because each jobsite is different, frontline workers must assess changing site conditions to identify hazards, applying what they’ve learned from their safety and compliance training to mitigate harm. This skill requires a combination of creativity, discipline and situational awareness in real time.
Unfortunately, the industry often considers compliance and safety as one and the same – and that’s a problem.
Job hazard analyses and pre-job briefings should never be treated solely as company-mandated compliance measures. Time spent on these activities should be dedicated to ensuring frontline employees truly understand the work and hazards ahead. Job forms signed without worker understanding are much like shields crafted from cheap paper: easily torn and ignored, potentially exposing users to fatal hazards.
The Courtroom vs. the Pole
Here’s another hard truth: While compliance measures often protect employers in courtrooms, that’s not necessarily the case for lineworkers.
Completed job forms help employers demonstrate to judges and juries that they fulfilled their legal obligations. But as any lineworker suspended 45 feet in the air will tell you, a signed job form will never support their weight as they work or prevent them or their coworker from making a potentially fatal error.
Sadly, some organizations have weaponized compliance paperwork, using it as grounds for discipline or termination. Yet it is critical to note here that compliance is not our enemy. This is about perspective. By viewing compliance as a safety tool rather than our end goal, we can focus on what we should be aiming at: sending workers home in the same condition they arrived in (or better).
Keep in mind that workers who believe safety rules and paperwork exist only to protect their employer will almost always sign their forms, nod during meetings and walk away unchanged – and likely unwilling to change.
Leadership Sets the Tone
This is an industry problem. Leadership sets the tone. Executives who speak about safety purely as a compliance metric send a message to crews, loud and clear, that employer liability concerns matter more than employee lives. When production is pushed at all costs, workers are taught that safety rules aren’t rules; they’re suggestions.
Good, strong leadership looks different. These executives invest in clarity and measure safety by how many workers return home uninjured, not the number of forms completed.
The fix to our industry’s safety culture is not complicated, but it requires courageous leaders who are willing to (1) prioritize employee understanding over signed job forms; (2) treat compliance paperwork as a living tool; (3) measure safety by outcomes, not optics; and (4) create organizational cultures in which workers believe the system exists to protect them.
Let’s stop pretending that more rules will save us. What we need is greater clarity, accountability and humanity in our approach. Safety is about people, not paperwork – but until we consistently treat it that way, we will keep paying the price.
About the Author: Stephen Shutt, CUSP, serves as an instructor and the director of powerline programs for Heavy Equipment Colleges of America. Reach him at stephen.shutt@hecofa.com.