What’s in a Number?
Written by Donald Brignac on . Posted in Safety Management.
Does it really mean anything if the RAI (Recordable Accident Incident Rate) for your non-payroll workers (hereafter referred to as “contractors”) is 6.2? At Entergy, where our most important value is to “Create and Sustain a Safe Working Environment,” numbers like those can be very important.
Utilities that utilize a large number of contractors realize how tall an order it can be to address the magnitude of challenges associated with contractor safety. The types of contractors used and the level of institutional safety controls applied by contractors can vary dramatically.
So where does an organization like Entergy start to address such a set of challenges? We’ve invested a considerable amount of time and energy in establishing a process to know how our contractors are performing. We began to establish guidelines about who, what, where and how we were going to measure performance. We developed an online system that allows our contractors to report hours worked and individual safety incidents by business unit, state and type of work.
Having this information allows us to identify problem areas and crews and target and apply specific performance improvement initiatives. One example is that after approximately nine months of data collection, it was obvious we had two service areas driving our overall performance numbers. Knowing which services were performing poorly and the types of incidents they were having allowed us to implement changes. As a result, both areas are now among our better performers.
MINIMUM STANDARDS
An additional benefit Entergy derived from implementing a reporting system was that we came to understand what constitutes a safe contractor and put in place minimum standards of safety performance for new contractors. The indicators we now use as preliminary signals for a contractor’s safety performance include how long they have been in business (we required at least two years), an EMR (Experience Modifier Rate) assigned by an insurance carrier that is less than .99, and a three-year average RAI of no more than 4.0, preferably trending downward.
Once a prospective contractor meets those initial requirements, we have a safety representative of the applicable business unit review, audit and rule on the completeness of a contractor’s safety plan. If a contractor is approved as an exception to the rules (usually by the highest level of a business unit), an Entergy employee is assigned as a safety mentor. That person is accountable for walking those responsible for guiding the contractor company through the first several months of its working relationship with Entergy to ensure our safety expectations are understood and the contractor exhibits acceptable safety performance.
We ultimately assign accountability for a contractor’s safety performance to Entergy’s operational business units, and Entergy employees now facilitate the safety performance of contractors in the applicable business unit. This culture change was challenging but ultimately rewarding. One of the mechanisms we use to help integrate contractor safety performance is accountability throughout our organization. This is a performance measure, and most salaried employees have a portion of their compensation tied to contractor safety performance.
Today, Entergy’s contractors know and understand that their safety performance numbers have great influence on their future business levels. Safety performance is a key ingredient in projects where competitive bids are used for awarding work; usually as much as 25 percent of a bid evaluation for a given project is influenced by past safety performance. Also, larger multi-year blanket agreements awarded to multiple contractors are apportioned according to comparative safety performance.
SCORECARD
Entergy is also actively partnering with our contractors to ensure that work is being performed safely. The cornerstone of this focus was the implementation of an observations process in the field, which we refer to as our Safety Performance Scorecard. The difference between these and past safety audits is that instead of just using a checklist of items, we also focus on a hazard assessment process.
In practice, an Entergy representative occasionally audits the work being performed in the field by contractors and checks for the existence of a Hazard Assessment Document (sometimes referred to as the Tailboard) and the quality of the document (Are all potential hazards identified? Is there a mitigation plan for the hazards identified?). Work proceeds only when the mitigation plans are being used and all crewmembers are aware of and understand the plan.
At the job site, as well, we ask each crew member crucial questions about Entergy’s rules (different questions depending on work type). These cover topics such as PPE, grounding, switching, tag out and clearance, cover-up when working on energized lines and fall protection. We don’t require the individual workers to have these memorized, though. In fact, we issue wallet-sized cards with the information, and we are just as impressed to see the cards taken out because it means that our message is reaching them.
At the job site, our observations are captured on a preprinted form, and at our office they are entered into a specially designed system. At a minimum, every four months, we sit down with our contractors’ managers and review the data gleaned from the observation process. Strong points are highlighted, and if any shortcomings are identified, we work together to develop recommendations to be included in the contractors’ plans.
POWERSAFE
Another important part of our contractor safety assurance efforts requires all of the contractors’ employees to demonstrate that they have met the minimum level of safety orientation and training requirements mandated by Entergy in the contract with the contractor. Their PowerSafe card is proof of that (www.powersafetraining.org).
For some time, Entergy struggled with how we could effectively ensure that all contractors’ employees were oriented to our safety values and expectations before working on our property or projects. While we knew that the management of our contractors understood, we needed to be sure that a consistent and timely message about those values was reaching every single contractor employee.
With much of our operation along the I-10 corridor through Texas and Louisiana, we were familiar with the orientation process applied by many petrochemical plants in the area. Facing a similar dilemma, they had joined forces to apply a consistent process. The solution employed by the petrochemical industry seemed perfectly adaptable to what we were trying to accomplish at Entergy.
We began working with the Louisiana Safety Council to develop something similar for our needs. Through these efforts, the PowerSafe program was developed. Today, in addition to the Basic PowerSafe Safety Orientation Program, we have worked with the safety council to include other lines of curriculum covering line work, vegetation management, substation work, meter readers and meter services.
PowerSafe core competencies include:
• Hazard Communications
• Personal Protective Equipment
• Hearing Conservation
• Housekeeping
• Basic Electrical Work Practices
• First Aid and Blood-Borne Pathogens
• Fall Protection
• Elevated Work Platforms
• General Safety
• Material Handling
• Hand Powered Tools
• Traffic and Work Area Safety
Benefits of the PowerSafe program are clear. They include reducing the burden on contractors’ management for training, providing secure and reliable records management, lowering the time and expense of safety training auditing by 75 percent or more, the time spent in training by up to 75 percent and enabling participating utility companies, including Entergy, to instantly verify training records on-site.
INDUSTRY PROGRAM
In the last few months, additional utility companies, such as Ameren and Southern Company, have expressed interest in utilizing PowerSafe and have started working with the Louisiana Safety Council and Entergy to standardize materials. Eventually, contractors working for multiple utilities can reap the cost and time-saving advantages of this growing industry program.
Safety professionals will tell you that measuring and paying attention to lagging indicators such as RAI or LWDIR (Lost Work Day Incident Rate) will only get you so far. At Entergy, however, the numbers tell a story. After implementing contractor safety programs, our cumulative contractor RAI has decreased from 6.20 in 2001 to 1.20 in 2008.
Have we been successful? So far, yes. At the same time, though, we continue to work toward reducing those numbers to zero. iP
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