The recommended intervals and content for safety training have been derived from decades of  incident data, decades of experience, and a dash or two of common sense. Among industry leaders, there’s a common desire for people to avoid injury and death on the job while also getting the job done in a professional and timely manner.

We all know it is foolish to gamble with employees’ lives and skimp on safety training “just this quarter” to get through a financial slump. However, it is desirable to reduce the cost of safety training. The key is to reduce the need for it in the first place.

One strategy is to specialize employees for specific types of work (and thus dangers). Not everyone has to be a “qualified employee” on every task. For safety training that is equipment specific, you need just enough qualified people to cover the maintenance and repair tasks normally associated with that equipment. If that equipment is critical, then you need a B string and perhaps a C string.

This strategy has its limits, and those can bring some operational consequences. For example, the two people who are safety trained for the robotic welder are deployed on other equipment that is equally important and now there is nobody to respond to a downtime call when that welder breaks down. There are also the problems of coverage when someone is sick or on vacation, or when someone dies, quits, or retires. In smaller shops, this strategy is often a non-starter due to this problem.

Another strategy is to focus heavily on working methodically. It involves:

• Using clearly written, concise procedures.
• Making the “measure twice, cut once” philosophy a cornerstone of company (or departmental) culture. And doing the same for the “no short cuts” principle.
• Refusing to rush people.
• Standardizing work methods.
• Ensuring the needed materials, tools, test equipment, and PPE are readily available, to reduce impromptu, unsafe “solutions.”

This does have a major effect on work quality and on improving safety. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for safety training. It does make safety training more effective by reducing variables that lead to unsafe acts and unsafe conditions.

An excellent strategy is to implement the hierarchy of risk control methods. This the most powerful way to reduce the need for safety training, especially if it is combined with the previously described strategies.

This hierarchy appears in table form for electrical hazards, in NFPA 70E, Informative Annex F, Table F.3. But a more inclusive, and more widely applicable one is the one that OSHA publishes on its website.

Notice that the graphic is an inverted pyramid. The widest part is for the most effective strategy, and at the bottom where it’s narrowest you find the least effective strategy.

1. The most effective thing you can do is remove the hazard completely. If the hazard does not exist, you don’t need safety training for that hazard. An example is a splice box that is inside a confined entry space. By moving the box to a space that is not confined you eliminate this hazard. If you eliminate all hazards of a particular class (e.g., confined entry), then you eliminate the safety training need for that hazard (at least for a given asset).
2. You can replace the hazard with something that isn’t dangerous. This is called “substitution.” Table F.3 gives the example of replacing 120V control circuitry with 24V control circuitry. Another example is the thermographic (aka “infrared viewing”) window on a switchgear enclosure; instead of using a camera on an open enclosure, a technician can read the camera while enjoying the protection of the enclosure. Some would argue that this is really the next type of strategy.
3. You can isolate people from the hazard. A good example of this is remote racking for circuit breakers. If you are 150 ft away, you don’t need intensive training on the approach boundary to be a “qualified person” to rack out that breaker. Remote measuring also falls under this category.
4. Administrative controls do not reduce the need for safety training, but they can make people safer. This is about changing how people work or how they behave on the work premises. The “work methodically” strategy covered earlier is an example.
5. The final layer of the hierarchy is PPE. This actually increases the need for safety training. For example, you must know how to handle, inspect, and use PPE correctly. The more you implement the first three strategies such that the need for PPE can be reduced or eliminated, the more you can reduce safety training costs.

You can use a combination of strategies to reduce the total amount of safety training needed in your organization. Just remember, though the most expensive safety training is the necessary safety training that gets done poorly or not at all.