New Year’s Day is the traditional time for resolutions, usually aimed at self-improvement and often drawn from reflections on the past.
New Year’s Day is the traditional time for resolutions, usually aimed at self-improvement and often drawn from reflections on the past. With that in mind, what follows below are our top 3 suggestions for resolutions to make the future safer, as well as to more effectively respond when things do go wrong, with links to more detailed discussions of them drawn from past articles.
1. Find and fix potential problems before they lead to actual problems.
This is (or should be) a basic tenet of any business. Monitoring through inspection that leads to repairs, fine tuning, and adjustments of the process will help to create a solid, dependable business plan. In the utility business, this means we need to constantly work at line patrol, pole inspections, and ROW maintenance; concentrating on doing an excellent job on the basics of our business. Avoid the trap of allowing basics to become routine, become mundane, or become boring, humdrum, tedious busy work. Give feedback, praise, and attention to those who do this work well. And don't forget to enlist other, less common sources of help, like your office staffers and contractors.
For more details see our articles on:
Shaping Workplace Attitudes (click here for Part One and here for Part Two)
Hazard Identification Training (click here)
Training Contractors (click here)
Management Gets the Workforce it Deserves (click here)
2. Put into practice constant improvement techniques.
Nothing lasts forever. Lines and poles built to the highest design standard, with excellent materials, and the highest degree of care still need to be maintained. So too with our work processes, which we need to monitor, review, tweak, and improve. One obvious opportunity to improve our process occurs when something goes wrong. Instead of prompting us to tell workers to be more careful, an accident, error, or failure should alert us to look very closely at what went wrong to understand why our process would allow this event, or in fact allow any of our workers to make this type of error. Almost every time we call something an accident, it is in fact a process error, a flaw in our way of doing things, that allowed a mistake to be made. Don’t look for a person to blame, look for a way to fix the problem!
For more details see our articles on:
Post Accident Review — Learning from things that go wrong. (click here for Part One and click here for Part Two)
Fix the Problem, Not the Blame! (click here)
Learning from Mistakes (click here)
3. Give your insurance partners the tools they need to help you.
The Hurtado & Associates Power Program staff and our insurance company partners work their hardest to provide you, our clients, with the best coverage programs available, the most efficient claims handling possible, and the strongest defense teams anywhere, all to protect you and your assets for the times when, despite all prevention efforts, you end up with a claim. But you have to see yourself as a key partner and an engaged participant in our efforts. With regard to the technical issues involved, you are the experts, not us. Your guidance regarding what happened and why it happened plays a key role in, for example, the handling of voltage irregularity claims, which make up a large chunk of the claims reported. So, when you make your initial report, if you know what happened and have strong feelings about how a case should be handled, put your thoughts into the report. When legally possible, claims adjusters will use your thoughts to guide their actions.
And speaking of claims reports, it is crucial that you make prompt report of all claims in order to ensure the best possible outcome. Late reporting can create many problems, not the least of which it that as time goes by, the likelihood of escalation in the amount claimed, or in the involvement of plaintiffs’ attorneys, increases. Related to this is the possibility of a case initially appearing as a no-liability case, or a very minor event, only to later explode into a major case. This is a particular concern in any and all line contact cases. In the event of a line contact, even when it seems clear that it was not your fault, it is vital that a report be made immediately. Steps that may need to be taken at once may not be possible later, so, protect yourself by reporting all cases, even if you expect nothing to result.
Perhaps most importantly, it is critical that any physical evidence be properly collected, labeled, protected, and preserved. We have several case histories of real-life claims that ended up costing huge amounts in defense and/or claims payments simply because important physical evidence was not available by the time the case ended up in suit. If you have any doubts, contact the claims people immediately. If you can’t reach them, contact your agent and ask that the agent immediately advise Hurtado & Associates.
For more details see our articles on:
Prompt Reporting of Claims (click here)
Save the Evidence (click here)
When in Doubt, Don’t Throw it Out! (click here)
Three resolutions are enough for anyone. We hope these will help you toward a safer 2015.
Have a happy and safe New Year!