There are striking similarities in how we respond to incidents, injuries and fatalities in our industry. Safety stand-downs are held. Utilities and contractors conduct incident investigations that are typically wrapped up with action items that need to be handled. But consider this: Is everything we do in the wake of an incident truly effective in preventing future incidents? Let’s take it one step further. Are all the things we’re doing on a daily basis helping to ensure employee safety, or do we sometimes simply check a box, satisfy a requirement and tell ourselves we’re making the job safer for our workers? My objective in writing this article is to take a hard look at some of the tactics we are currently using in the name of safety. I will occasionally use or allude to the phrase “imagined reality”; this is not intended to be flippant or sarcastic. The truth of our human existence is that we create our own reality and then build systems around it. Take religion, for example. There are different religions whose followers have different beliefs and worship in different buildings – yet we can put a rover on Mars when we all work together regardless of our differences. In the utility industry, we sometimes create an imagined reality of safety by doing certain things that we believe will make our workforce safer – but do they actually work? And if they’re not working, what can we do as an industry to improve? Think about this: The continued occurrences of serious injuries and fatalities tell us something. Even with the best training and the latest new safety initiatives, we have been unable to outsmart human fallibility. The smartest people in safety with the highest degrees in the land have been unable to save the last lineworker who was killed on the job. So, if we want to continue progressing in terms of safety in our workplaces, we may need to try some new tactics. In the remainder of this article, we’re going to look at four different items – the safety stand-down, the safety moment, the job briefing and leadership style – to gauge their effectiveness and discuss what we can do to make them more impactful for the workforce. 1. The Safety Stand-Down I have been involved with many safety stand-downs as a lineman, manager and safety director. In my experience, the safety stand-down has become a standard action item when an incident or near-miss is serious enough to warrant a temporary job shutdown. During a stand-down, there are often speakers and a document that is presented to workers, with the event typically taking place in a classroom, at a show-up site or on the job site. The information provided at the stand-down is usually relevant, timely and accurate. But what impact does it have on the workforce? If we model a narrative of talking to or at a group of workers and there is little to no interaction, it is unlikely that the information will be impactful or lasting for the workers. Of course, there’s no doubt that during some safety stand-downs, there is a skilled presenter who engages and involves the audience, prompting deep thought and contemplation of what could have been done to avoid the incident altogether. The reality is that a stand-down is only as good as its presenter. elite@thespeakerlab.com When assessing the effectiveness of a safety stand-down, ask yourself, what will change tomorrow because of the stand-down today? When a stand-down is put together by management for their workers, the result is often a stand-down about what management thinks is necessary to present in order to prevent recurrence. But a stand-down should be negotiated with the crew that experienced the event, and their input – along with the input of other crews – is critically necessary if we want an impact to be made. Otherwise, the stand-down is a check-the-box event so that crews can eventually get back to work; it is a means to satisfy a requirement. A stand-down presented only by management is also the kind of event that can potentially erode trust between workers and management. Education is supposed to be focused on students. Similarly, medicine should be patient centered. So, why does much of safety seem to be generated more by management than workers? When an initiative originates in management with no worker input, the worker is not a partner in the process. And if you are currently managing safety without partnering with your workforce on initiatives, there’s a good chance that what you are doing isn’t going to resonate with your workforce. 2. The Safety Moment At one point in my career, I ran a small satellite garage for an electric utility. The company broadcasted a safety message at the same time every workday. Sometimes I would be in the middle of a task, such as establishing a clearance for an outage over the radio, and everything would have to stop so we could listen to the safety message. One year, I did a small anecdotal study, visiting crews on their job site twice a week at noon. Each time I visited, I would ask the crew what the safety message had been for the day. Most often, nobody knew. This was another management initiative, one that gave them the illusion that they were helping to make the workplace safer. But truthfully, the safety moment as it was presented was mostly a distraction. A well-timed safety moment, however – such as before a meeting begins – has the potential to be an engaging event that connects everyone. There are still a few that remain in my consciousness all these years later. To be effective, a safety moment must engage the audience in some way, and it shouldn’t interrupt workers when they are trying to safely complete their tasks. If you decide you must have a safety moment, pick a good time for it, and use it to foster interaction among workers. One good method to try is to offer a famous quote and ask workers how it might apply to the work ahead that day. 3. The Job Briefing The job briefing is a requirement under OSHA 29 CFR 1910.269 and 1926 Subpart V. It’s something we must do in our line of work. Yet not all job briefings are presented the same way. If we have been modeling a narrative to our crews in our safety stand-downs, with little engagement or interaction, then it’s likely the same thing is happening during job briefings. But it’s conversations and interactions among workers that keep them connected, and those connections will help to keep the crews safe. Please don’t get me wrong; I believe the information in the briefing is crucial, and the briefing is a legal requirement. Yet how we conduct a job briefing should encourage the interaction and engagement that need to continue among workers all day long. If you lead job briefings for your organization, the goal should be curious and interested engagement among crew members with the opportunity for anyone to ask questions or contribute their thoughts. 4. Leadership Style Your leadership style will directly affect the types of interactions that occur on your watch. There are some great books written by U.S. Navy SEALs that cover leadership, planning and implementation. The SEALs have a test-and-learn philosophy. They are experts at being able to outsmart their opponents as a unit, not as individuals. We can learn from them by how connected they are to each other in movement and communication. Just as with our work, bad things happen when they are not connected. Our focus should be on engagement and interaction, but our industry often models a narrative, which can create an illusion of safety. We can also learn from the late renowned management consultant, educator and author Peter Drucker. When someone would say, “That was a great meeting,” Drucker would ask, “So, what will change Monday for the worker as a result of this great meeting?” It’s a valid question. What are we doing to move the needle for the worker? The answer to that question will be limited if we haven’t involved the worker in the process. In the 1980s, Ski Magazine published an article titled, “Is the one-hour private ski lesson a fraud?” The premise was that flash-in-the-pan training for one hour has little lasting effect on current behaviors. The same could be said about hosting that expert trainer for a one-time session intended to introduce ideas to steer your company’s practices or culture. As a former ski instructor, I used to offer three to five one-hour lessons to help ensure a change occurred in the skier’s movement pattern. That was highly successful. I believe the same applies to training in the utility industry. As opposed to a 60-minute, one-time meeting, it is more effective to offer a tactic or strategy and then partner with a worker on their turf to apply the tactic. Setting aside a few minutes every couple of weeks to practice a tactic and have that tactic become part of the workday will identify if the tactic is of any value or not. The 60-minute, one-time expert meeting has proven to have low effects on behavioral change. We may like the content, but follow-up is crucial if you are looking to create change. If there is no follow-up to encourage and verify, there will be no change. Conclusion Some of what we do doesn’t necessarily make anything safer. Instead, it creates an illusion of safety that satisfies the status quo. I have written this article in hopes that we will realize that we must try new things and question rituals if we want to continue to improve worker safety. Every week, some workers head to their jobs and lose their lives for reasons that could have been prevented. That should be incentive enough to stop doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. Recognizing that checking a box and fulfilling a requirement is just an illusion of safety is merely one place to start. It requires effort to engage our workforce and involve them in solutions. Are you willing to try? About the Author: Bill Martin, CUSP, NRP, RN, DIMM, is the president and CEO of Think Tank Project LLC (www.thinkprojectllc.com). He has held previous roles as a lineman, line supervisor and safety director.

Anatomically modern humans emerged over 100,000 years ago. For the bulk of that time, the environment in which we lived didn’t change much or very quickly. Now, think about how much the world has changed in just the last 100 years. One interesting thing to consider is how modern human innovation has continued to overcome innate human deficiencies. We control the environment around us now more than ever, including the way we travel, the way we enjoy the arts, the way we grow our food, the way we care for our sick and injured, and – to bring this point home – the way we protect ourselves. Today, in our industry, we have access to state-of-the-art training facilities, cutting-edge tools and advanced protective equipment. Our brains, on the other hand, are the same or at least very similar to the brains of the first modern humans. Our ability to take in information about the world around us and make judgments based on that information hasn’t really changed much. Now, overlay that with how the world has changed in the last century, and you can start to see the problem. It’s not that the human brain isn’t a glorious machine capable of incredible things, but it hasn’t had the time to evolve to meet the demands of the modern world. Our brains are currently bombarded with information nearly every second of the day and must filter through all of it to make decisions – sometimes very quickly – that will hopefully result in success instead of failure. It’s also important to note that, over time, the human brain has evolved to take shortcuts, reducing cognitive load to operate in the most energy-efficient way possible. This is where our brain’s greatness gets us into trouble – by taking shortcuts, making decisions based on limited information, misinterpreting the presence or severity of danger, and making assumptions based on previous experiences. This sets the stage for why and how workers continue to get injured or killed by high-energy hazards, even with all of our excellent training facilities, tools and protective equipment. If not properly eliminated or controlled, high-energy hazards can result in workers being struck by objects, being caught in something or between two or more items, or being in the line of fire when energy is released. And if our brains are pushing us to take shortcuts, misinterpreting risk levels and making assumptions – which they often do – the combination is a potential recipe for disaster. Some Important Definitions Before we address prevention methods for these types of incidents, let’s first take a moment to review some important definitions as well as some injury statistics. “Struck-by” injuries, per OSHA, are “injuries produced by forcible contact or impact between the injured person and an object or piece of equipment.” “Caught-in” and “caught-between” injuries are defined by OSHA as those injuries “resulting from a person being squeezed, caught, crushed, pinched, or compressed between two or more objects, or between parts of an object. This includes individuals who get caught or crushed in operating equipment, between other mashing objects, between a moving and stationary object, or between two or more moving objects.” OSHA Severe Injury Reports The severe injury reports produced by OSHA (see www.osha.gov/severeinjury) provide an opportunity to analyze the occurrence of serious injuries, what caused them and how severe they were. In 2021, line-of-fire injuries accounted for 33% of all event types resulting in serious injury on construction sites. Although struck-by injuries represent the majority, a third of all line-of-fire injuries can be attributed to caught-in and caught-between events. Here are some examples of severe injuries:

• An employee was operating a scissor lift when their finger got caught between an electrical panel and the lift’s railing, resulting in a fingertip amputation.
• An employee was walking under an aerial lift when they were struck by a box full of materials that fell from the lift, resulting in a concussion and brain bleeding.
• While flagging traffic, an employee was struck by a falling utility pole. The employee suffered a broken ankle.

Hazard Management So, how do we effectively manage these types of hazards? Consider the following four-step process. Step 1: Anticipate the Hazard When discussing how to control hazards, we tend to start with hazard identification on the job site. Perhaps a better approach is to start by anticipating hazards in advance of the work. If you can plan for the types of typical hazards that develop during certain tasks, you can take preemptive measures to remove or control them. Step 2: Identify the Hazard Identifying the hazard or hazards is arguably the most important part of the hazard assessment. This is where your team has a chance to seek out line-of-fire hazards wherever they may be hiding. The energy wheel is a great tool that can be used to identify high-energy hazards of various types; examples include gravity, chemical, electrical and mechanical. If you don’t identify high-energy hazards, that means they will not be controlled, and the crew misses an opportunity to protect themselves. Keep in mind that not all high-energy hazards will be present at the start of a job; many develop during work as conditions change. Step 3: Eliminate the Hazard The best course of action is to eliminate hazards when possible. There are varying degrees of protection afforded to the worker through different levels of effective safety controls. Removing the hazard is job one, but that is not always possible. Step 4: Control the Hazard The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s hierarchy of controls tells us that if hazards cannot be eliminated, workers must apply a series of controls based on availability and effectiveness. The ideal result is one in which risk is dramatically decreased using engineering, substitution and administrative controls. Essentially, the worker reduces risk to the greatest extent possible. If a hazard still exists, the worker must be protected with suitable PPE as a final level of defense. Properly selected PPE that is suited to the hazard and worn by trained, knowledgeable workers will offer protection, but it is still not nearly as effective as elimination or substitution. Good planning before and during the job, plus a review after the job, can help prevent line-of-fire injuries. Allow time to discuss the job, identify high-energy hazards, and select the proper tooling and equipment to control them. Discuss what went right and what can be improved upon after the job. Conclusion The world around us is complex – and so is the human brain; it’s a marvel that is responsible for an incredible amount of innovation. It’s also purpose built for a previous world. Today, our brains need some assistance. They require time to evaluate complex environments and conditions, help to overcome cognitive biases, and input from others to establish collective understanding. There are tools and techniques available that can help us overcome these issues. We must develop our workers to anticipate, identify and control risk, and to have the discipline to stop work until unsafe conditions are corrected. Show workers how to leverage tools such as the energy wheel during hazard assessments and job briefings. Train them to select the proper safety controls based on risk level, and ensure they know PPE is their last line of defense, with elimination being the ultimate goal. Teach them to build extra margins or capacity into their job plans. A little extra time, space and communication will go a long way in protecting our workers from unexpected human errors and equipment failures. Finally, become personally involved in training, coaching and field evaluations. Together, we can reduce the number of injuries and fatalities related to high-energy hazards. About the Author: Mike Starner, CUSP, CHST, has 30 years of experience in the electric utility industry and currently serves as the executive director of outside line safety for the National Electrical Contractors Association.