Page 31 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2018

ELECTRICAL SAFETY
Workplace Electrical Safety and Organizational Context
Good safety practice requires that workers take responsibility for their own safety and that of their co-workers. But it’s also important that organizations empower them to do so.
BY RICHARD CAMPBELWL
www.ohsonline.com
JUNE 2018 | Occupational Health & Safety 27
hen it comes to workplace injury, pre- vention is invariably the best medi- cine—for workers and employers alike. This maxim is particularly true when
it comes to electrical injuries, which oftentimes in- volve severe physical wounds, emotional trauma (for victims as well as co-workers and family members), difficult rehabilitation, and expensive medical treat- ment.1,2 Unfortunately, while electrical injuries are generally on the decline, they are not rare events. On average, there are more than 2,000 non-fatal electri- cal injuries at work each year, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).3,4 Although not all of these injuries are serious, a substantial portion of them are; BLS data also indicates that more than 1,700 workers suffered fatal electrical injuries in the ten- year period from 2006 through 2015.4
Protecting workers from electrical injury has been the essential mission of NFPA 70E, Standard for Elec- trical Safety in the Workplace,5 since the mid-1970s, when it was first developed at the request of the Occu- pational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Electrical safety procedures involve a range of best practices to protect workers exposed to electrical haz- ards, including requirements around safety training, shutting off power prior to working on equipment, use of personal protective equipment, and many other preventive measures.6 But the extent to which those safety precautions are implemented in the workaday world of real life is another matter, and one that falls outside the control of technical requirements alone.
Research into workplace electrical injury clearly indicates that workers often perform work on equip- ment or circuits that are energized, are not always equipped with appropriate personal protection equip- ment, and oftentimes haven’t received the right train- ing for the work they perform.7-9 There are multiple reasons for these failings in electrical safety—workers may be in a hurry to complete a job, or fail to recog- nize an unmarked hazard, or not have the right pro- tective gear on hand to undertake the task at hand. It is accordingly important not just to gain a better understanding of how workers are getting injured, but also to make some effort to identify the “causes of the causes” of electrical injury and to highlight barriers to improved compliance with the best electrical safety practices that are already on the books.
To this end, organizational safety culture is gaining
recognition as a crucial factor that shapes the extent to which safety considerations are incorporated into the performance of day-to-day work tasks. Safety cul- ture is broadly defined as the “deeply held but often unspoken safety-related beliefs, attitudes, and values that interact with an organization’s systems, practic- es, people, and leadership to establish norms about how things are done in an organization.”10 Without a strong and visible organizational commitment to safety, workers will arguably be more attentive to rec- ognition and reward systems that emphasize tangible contributions to productivity than to the critical re- quirements of electrical safety procedure.
Meeting notes indicated that work-
ers were reminded of the need to take appropriate safety precautions and not to work live—but were promptly reminded in the very next agenda item that forthcoming holiday bonuses were contingent upon how well the company managed to meet existing production schedules.
Sending Mixed Messages to Workers
We recently completed research that offers some indi- cation of how extraneous considerations might influ- ence task-specific electrical safety practices.4 As part of the research, we examined a number of OSHA in- vestigation reports of workplace arc flash and electric shock injury events. It was evident in some of these incidents that electrical safety requirements were in subtle (or not so subtle) competition with pressures to get the work done.
Consider the role of mixed messages in commu- nicating priorities to workers. In one of the investiga- tions we reviewed, a managing partner of an electrical services company was electrocuted while working late at night on a lighting unit that had been left energized in order to save time and complete a job by the next day. While the decision to work live raises a host of is- sues relating to safety culture—including the unlikely prospect that subordinate members of a work crew would suggest to their supervisor that it would be bet- ter to turn the power off—it was in a company meet-