Contrary to what some supervisors might think, electricians and maintenance techs tend not to complain. They tend to be doers. If they see an unsafe condition, they will usually either work around it or fix it themselves. The first approach saves time but is unsafe. The second approach ends up being a game of whack-a-mole.
In a central Tennessee plant, an office administrator somehow had a door key to several transformer vaults. Electricians servicing transformers and panels would squeeze past stacks of boxes of paper files in one electrical equipment room and work next to a dozen boxes of spare fluorescent lamps in another.
In an Illinois office building, the equipment closets were often jammed full of boxes of reams of paper. The electricians would remove those boxes, do their work, and not put the boxes back. They didn’t want to argue with the office manager and figured he’d figure out the boxes don’t go there. But what the office manager figured was the electricians were “too lazy” to put the boxes back where they belong.
The problem in both cases is that management was putting the burden of identifying, reporting, and solving unsafe conditions onto the backs of the electricians/maintenance techs. Since nothing got reported — and management wasn’t looking for these conditions — management had no clue these unsafe conditions were chronically present and chronically endangering workers.
The wrong solution is to empower the electricians to report the conditions. That typically means telling them it’s their responsibility to report these. So then what happens? They report an equipment closet misused as a storage area and earn the wrath of the office manager. Maintenance POs get slow-walked, and other punishment gets meted out. It doesn’t matter if the complaint went anonymously into a safety suggestion box; the office manager will know who is to blame (regardless of who it actually is)
The correct solution is to create performance objectives for each person in a management role so each is individually held responsible for unsafe conditions in his or her area of authority. Provide the necessary training and provide the necessary supervision. This also ends the blame game for being reported by maintenance personnel, since the reporting would be done by the safety director and the senior managers at the plant (e.g., plant manager) or office (e.g., VP of operations).
An interesting side benefit of this arrangement is it provides cover for those in the field who encounter unsafe working conditions, and thus more will get reported and solved. An office manager who gets an “I’m on your side, so here’s a problem that could bite you if someone else finds it” helpful hint from an electrician, his response will be gratitude. Compliance under this arrangement is high, and games of whack-a-mole don’t get played even once.
