Page 16 - OHS, April 2021

TRAINING: ELECTRICAL SAFETY
It’s no secret that people are more likely to suffer an injury if they’re moving at a faster pace than usual.
pace and risk feel comfortable. Every worker needs to be properly educated on the electrical hazards they may face over the course of their job, but this type of training tends to be informational, which makes it ill-suited to overcome rushing and other factors like complacency. Because workers who know the hazards can still speed through their tasks without noticing an exposed wire in the equipment they’re using.
Rushing is a lot like electrical hazards in that it affects almost everyone, and appears in a shocking variety of ways. But whereas electrical safety has a thousand permutations (many of which are situation-specific), rushing is quite the opposite.
The skills and knowledge required for workers to recognize when they’re rushing are the same in almost any context, which means it can protect them from coming into contact with electricity. (This makes it particularly useful for construction workers and other folks who must contend with a wide variety of electrical-based hazards.)
But people rarely develop these skills and knowledge on their own—they need to be trained on them. And they need to be given plenty of support too. To further insulate your workers from electrical hazards, you should educate them on human factors and keeping electrical risks front of mind.
Human Factors Education
Everyone knows what it feels like to be in a rush. Typically, our heart rate elevates, we move more rapidly, maybe there’s a little adrenaline spike, and our minds (and sometimes our eyes) start looking ahead to the next task rather than focusing on what we’re currently doing.
No one needs to be taught this, but knowing what it feels like doesn’t do us much good if we aren’t aware of the dangers rushing poses—that taking our eyes and mind off the job at hand can quickly lead to an injury. It’s also helpful if we have practice in slowing down when we find ourselves rushing. It’s even better if we can anticipate when we’re likely going to be rushing and then take steps to compensate accordingly.
This seems pretty simple: Tell people to slow down and pay attention, right? Unfortunately, without a strong grasp of why it’s so important, plus a solid foundation of practice, this type of messaging will be effective for fifteen minutes, give or take. It’s the same as telling children to be careful when they’re in the middle of playing. It’s not realistic to expect rushing to ever go away with a simple instruction, which means it will need to be managed.
And something so ingrained and intuitively simple will need to be regulated and offset with an equal amount of thinking and practice, sort of like Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
These types of awareness skills and safety knowledge are best delivered through formal training and lots of structured practice, communication and reinforcement. Rushing falls under the umbrella of human factors—physical and mental states that affect our thoughts and actions. A rigorous human factors education program will ground workers in a basic understanding of rushing, and other factors like distraction and fatigue, while also providing practical tactics to deal with these issues in real time.
One major ancillary benefit—human factors training applies to all aspects of rushing. It will boost employees’ ability to spot electrical hazards, and it will also reduce the likelihood that someone will trip while hustling to the break room, make an error while trying to finish a task at the end of the day, or get into a speed-related crash on their drive home.
Keep Risks Front of Mind
Understanding the ins and outs of human factors is incredibly important. So is keeping that knowledge front of mind for workers, especially when they’re still learning to put their human factors or awareness training into practice.
The standard playbook for reinforcing safety information applies here: posters, toolbox talks and short bursts of refresher training are all effective options. But there’s one caveat. Rushing is frequently situational. Therefore, one of the best methods of preparing workers to recognize rushing is through situation-based conversations.
To do that, talk about hypothetical situations, ask what- if questions (“What will you do if you notice the internal urge to hurry up and get this task done?”) and talk about the daily scenarios when workers are most likely to overlook electrical hazards because they’re in a rush. Ask open-ended questions and let employees rely on their own expertise. They know better than anyone what their days look like, and every worker can tell you how the risks posed by rushing fluctuate.
Once people start recognizing when they’re rushing, they become able to switch their focus in the moment to safety and consider what risks they might be overlooking, or what they need to pay attention to while they complete the work—especially if slowing down isn’t a realistic option.
This is where electrical safety training can mesh with human factors training. For instance, when teaching people who work with corded tools about electrical safety, you can ask them to add a quick visual inspection of the cord as one of the items on their short mental checklist when they pause to reflect on their rushing. Now you’ve made the invisible gorilla more visible, since rushing occurs so much more frequently than a frayed cord.
Once supervisors understand the implications of human factors, they’re less likely to make demands of workers that will cause them to rush. They may also learn to offer safety reminders, look for hazards themselves, or make sure electrical or other issues are dealt with proactively. When frontline leaders start supporting workers to use their human factors skills and knowledge to recognize electrical safety issues, you’ll be well on your way to drastically reducing the number of electricity-related injuries in your workforce.
Ray Prest is the Director of Marketing at SafeStart, a company focused on human factors solutions that reduce preventable deaths and injuries on and off the job. Ray’s been helping people learn about safety and training for over 20 years.
12 Occupational Health & Safety | APRIL 2021
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