As we enter a new year, we have a clean slate on the OSHA logs once again – and that’s great news!
Steve Savon, our safety and regulatory consultant, authored this month’s practical article on OSHA record keeping that we hope you enjoy. As a lineman, well, I’ll just say that Steve enjoys those things a lot more than I do, and he does an amazing job, so I’m thankful!
What I look forward to in the new year is a fresh focus on the presence of safety at our co-ops and with our crews, rather than just the absence of injury. We love safety metrics with small numbers, and I don’t want to undermine the incident report which we will have soon for 2023. However, we have learned that the most effective way to truly gauge SIF-related safety performance is by focusing on the presence of safety, not the absence of injuries.
With that said, we have learned through the current strategy lab surveys that several co-ops in OH/WV do not facilitate weekly in-house safety meetings! Wouldn’t it be amazing to see all 25 of our co-ops facilitating linemen-led weekly safety meetings in 2024 with the SAFE Talk as the topic to get the open discussion started? That’s the challenge I’ll throw out there for this year – let us know how it goes!
We hope you enjoy this quarter’s edition of SAFELINES.