MVP Electrical Safety Program

Published:

By Jeff MacKinnon, P.Eng., PE

This week in my newsletter I wrote about the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle with respect to electrical safety programs, or really any project that seems really big when you have a blank piece of paper.

In this post I want to talk a little about what I think should be included in the first published electrical safety program for a company/site. The MVP, the minimum viable program, taken from the idea in start-ups of the minimum viable product. I wrote about this a little before, but I think its time to expand on that.

What is an Electrical Safety Program?

Let's start with a quick definition so that we are on the same page.

Electrical Safety Program a documented system consisting of safety principles, policies, procedures, and processes that directs the activities appropriate for the risk associated with electrical hazards. [1]

Breaking this down a little the important terms for the MVP are:

  • documented - it has to be written
  • policies - this is based on what the company does and the type of work that they do. The policies will be different for an electrical contractor, plant electrician and office worker.
  • procedures and processes - I think of these are the same thing. The procedures are the written down checklists for implementing the processes.
  • risk associated with electrical hazards - notice that this definition doesn't mention arc flash, labels, or PPE. Labels aren't a MVP.

Documenting

If it was me I would start a sphinx project to start typing text documents and make sure that I'm tracking changes using git, but I'm very nerdy and I'm always going on about lock-in and text documents are the best way to prevent lock-in. Since you aren't like me, a simple Word or LibreOffice document is perfect.

Policies

If your company does electrical work on your site, or customer's, then you need to determine how you want to handle energized work, whether you do it, or not, and how you will document that work.

There are other hazards to consider but for the most part the two you should start with are:

  1. Arc Flash
  2. Shock

Procedures and processes

For the MVP you probably don't need to include much here, but you should start including:

  • Job briefing checklist (Job safety plan, etc)
  • Energized Electrical Work Permit
  • Lockout-Tagout Procedure

Risk Analysis

There are two parts of a risk analysis, the severity of the risk and its likelihood of occurrence. Until you have an Arc Flash Analysis you will have to use other methods to determine the likely energy levels when exposed to energized parts.

The MVP Electrical Safety Program Itself

Everything before this is essentially what an electrical safety program is, but it doesn't include what the document should include.

The best thing to do is to list out the questions that need to be answered, the post that I linked to above has a lot of good questions to start with.

I would start a table of contents that includes the following:

  • Introduction
  • Roles and Responsibilities
  • Job Safety Planning
  • Safe Work Practices and Procedures

These are pretty wide open as they are, but its a start. The development of the electrical safety program should have a clear schedule for the improvement, tight at the start, maybe as short as a week but no longer than a month and then get longer as the program becomes more developed.

Electrical Safety Program - Introduction

The introduction will cover a few sub-sections including:

  • Scope
  • Purpose
  • Definitions

Some ideas for coming up with electrical safety program scope and purpose here. Think about what your company does, and what the workers do on a daily, monthly, annual basis.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be adding more information about what should be included in these sections, and where I think the priorities should be for the development.

Other tools

Until you have the first couple of passes of the electrical safety program prepared, and there are clear stakeholders developed within the organization (it must include high level management and on the ground workers) I don't recommend veering into the realm of SAAS or business management tools. Use the tools that you have, but better still keep a live document where the team and stakeholders can work on it continuously.

For many companies this document and a folder with the various forms/permits and record will be enough.

Footnotes

[1]Definition from the 2021 version of CSA Z462:21 Workplace electrical safety