Spoiler alert! Not much has changed since last year.
Ladders and Powered Industrial Trucks swapped rankings and training requirements for fall protection bumped general electrical citations off of the top 10.
See the data for yourself from 2016 here, and 2017 here.
“Only” three of the top 10 standards cited are 1926, construction standards, however all of the standards on the top 10 apply to construction. I’m sure, as usual, construction site citations skew the top 10 list.
What can we learn from this snooze-fest of a repeat top 10 list?
Training and allocated resources must translate to correct use of equipment and application of concepts at the worker level. This is a tremendously loaded concept because it involves a healthy and functioning safety program and culture. As a safety consultant, I’d love to be able to bottle and sell safety culture to you, but I just can’t.
OSHA actually has a really great guide titled Recommended Practices for Safety & Health Programs that covers everything a safety professional, whether in-house or consultant, should implement for success. That guide is here.
Training is a common corrective action but in my opinion it is ineffective. If people were asked in most of the cited cases if they knew the what should have occurred they could probably tell you so, it isn’t a lack of knowledge. My experience has been that normally the what is lacking is the perception of risk associated with the work. Since perception is based on experiences if there was never a failure doing it that way then the employee will not perceive any risk.
This is really good discussion – training must be coupled with accountability.