Fostering an electrical safety culture

At the end of each year, it is an annual tradition for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to release the top 10 most cited violations of the year across all industries. However, the year 2020 has proved to be anything but traditional, and the final numbers have yet to be tabulated. Early reports have indicated that the number of violations for Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) have exceeded last year’s; however, until these numbers can be verified by OSHA, we can analyze previous years’ data where the number of violations and their deviation has been minimal. Veteran safety consultants urge employers to keep an eye out for the annual OSHA Top 10 report. This list is one of the best starting points on the path toward fostering a robust safety culture, as one safety consultant advises. “Minimally, an employer should have the responsibility of asking, ‘Do any of these Top 10 affect me?’ Because this is the easiest place if our friends from OSHA should come to visit,” says JoAnn Dankert, senior safety consultant at the National Safety Council. “I think a portion of why we see these over and over again is there’s a lot of parts to many of the standards, which makes it easier for OSHA to cite us if we missed something, and some parts take time to implement,” says Dankert. “They aren’t necessarily bad, but they do take resources, and for smaller organizations, people might be doing HR and safety, or they’re doing facility maintenance and safety. Maybe they’re the person, the admin, that sits in the lobby and they’re trying to do safety on the side.”