Overview

Before Using the Pre-Job Brief Toolbox:
Job and task briefings are critical to conducting our work in a safe manner.

After...
Job and task briefings are critical to protecting us from on-the-job hazards. The briefings also enable the organization to remove previously hidden, latent organizational hazards.

The Backstory

One day at a WECC human performance meeting several utilites a contractor and a vendor were comparing the pre-job briefs used by their individual organizations. As they were comparing the 5-7 pre-job briefs they realized that no single pre-job brief was "complete" but across all of these pre-job briefs there was a "more complete" pre-job brief. That team and a few advisors decided to see if they could not collect many more pre-job briefs from across the electric utilities industry and try to come up with some sort of "tool box" that would be useful to anyone who is updating or writing a new pre-job brief.

If You Were Going to Update or Write a New PJB

• Get a Blank Sheet of Paper
• Set Your Goal High: To Prevent the Next Event...(not solely a post event legal document)
• Review the Minimum OSHA Requirements
• Ask Dozens of Your Colleagues for their PJB's
• Examine those dozens of PJBs for Consistencies and the Inconsistencies
• Look for a Pattern of Good Practices
• Learn How Your Colleagues Have Been Applying Human Performance

Well guess what?
You don't have to do all that work. The pre-job brief team did it for you.

We reached out to our colleagues across the U.S. electric power industry to pin (share) their pre-job briefs to an online cork board that we setup:

Pin Your PJB   www.safetyspectrum.com/pjbs

Dozens of Utilites, contractors and vendors have been pinning (sharing) their pre-job briefs and new ones are pinned all the time. The pre-job brief team has been examining every one of those pre-job briefs and extracting what we call tools: OSHA tools, Good Practice tools and Human Peformance tools. Essentially we are just collecting pre-job briefs and doing a simple, but very tedious benchmarking exercise.

Why did we start out the project this way?
Originally the team was at a meeting comparing pre-job briefs and we realized that across the industry no utility, contractor or vendor had the perfect pre-job brief. However, taken together as a whole all of the pre-job briefs from across the industry contain almost every hazard mitigation strategy learned from previous events. To put it more simply "No one of us is as smart as all of us..."

Prerequisite: Job Hazard Analysis (JHA)

Job hazard analysis (JHA) is a predetermined list of hazards that could be encountered within a specific job. For example a battery work JHA would lay out expected hazards such as acid spills, burns, lead contamination, DC electrical shock hazards. The JHA is a management control that allows a particular job to be researched by an organizations occupational health group as well as it’s technical services to ensure that no hidden hazards or latent organizational hazards exist.

In addition the JHA should contain any technical or safety procedures associated with the work. This is an area any organization could really benefit. Many organizations have safety procedures in several documents, and often some of the procedures or standards get overlooked. JHA’s can be used for job planning, as well as building the pre-job brief. This will eliminate lengthy check box PJB forms with too many check boxes that do not apply to the task. JHA’s are a critical piece of an organization's safety culture.

Prerequisite: Understanding Pre-Task versus Pre-Job Briefs (briefings):

It is important that the two are considered separately. The pre-job brief is a larger scale (relative to the task) where the crew are led by a foreman or other in charge of the job. Details of the entire job or day are discussed. This may include multiple critical steps such as grounding, rigging, conductor work, etc.

A pre-task brief is a personal tool where the worker or a group of workers, just before the individual executes a critical step the individual should take a moment to ensure they are ready and in the right place about to take the right action. Then afterward they should review that action to ensure it went properly. Typically there is no form filled out. This is often guided by SAFER (summarize critical steps, anticipate likely errors, forsee consequences, evaluate defenses, review action) or two minute rule (taking a moment to ensure you review the worksite before a critical step).

Usage

Class: OSHA

OSHA has pre-job brief requirements that all employers must follow before a work task is executed. In the Pre-Job Brief Toolbox we consider the following OSHA class tools:

Hazards
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
Control of Energized Sources
Work Procedures

Class: Good Practices

Many electric utilities, contractors and vendors in addtion to the OSHA class tools also tend to add in some good practices. For example, a table showing the minimum approach distance for various high voltages is not required to be in the pre-job brief. However, many pre-job briefs include a simple table of minimum approach distances. In the Pre-Job Brief Toolbox we consider the following Good Practices class tools:

Emergency Preparedness
Minimum Approach Distance (MWD)
Designated Observer or Spotter

Class: Human & Organizational Performance

It is a normal part of an organizations’s business model to inadvertently create hazards which reduce human performance. Workforce capability and human performance can be divided into management, team and individual levels - more than half of all event reports indicate some management or organizational challenges. Building human performance into the pre-job brief enables organzations to identify latent organzational hazards and work toward reducing catastrophic events toward zero. The pre-job brief toolbox considers the following Human Performance class tools:

Critical Steps
Error Traps
Human Performance Tools for the Individual
After Action Review

The Critical Step Is..."The Critical Steps"
Many organizations are adding human performance artifacts to their pre-job briefs. Please do not understimate how important it is to lead that effort with critical step. It is often said that everyone in the company from the CEO to the last person hired must understand the concept of the critical steps and use that concept even when not at work, for example driving home and encountering a critical step as simple as driving through a busy intersection. Why? Because a clear discussion of the anticipation and flawless execution of critical steps of the job and tasks at hand makes the focus of the pre-job and pre-task brief much more proactive.

How can an organization expect a person to be able to understand what error traps to consider and what personal human performance tools to consider if they can not anticipate the critical step(s) in a given job and for the given tasks in a job. Errors made during the execution of irreversible critical steps are usually not forgiving. Several persons on the pre-job brief team worked as electricians and lineman and they have a saying that goes back generations: "There are bold electricians and lineman but there are no old, bold electricians and lineman" Miscues during critcal steps can result in near misses and even end with a catastrophic event. If there is ever a time to self check, peer check, stop and think or use your favorite human performance tool it is at each critical step. It is rare for a pre-job brief to have a human performance area and not ask the team or person to discuss and write down what they believe are the critical steps.

After the job and tasks are completed the team should be asking if there were any sigificant risks or issues that were previously unknown. This important to be able to use the pre-job brief as a manangement control to remove latent organizational hazards. But it is also important in the after action review to go through the critical steps again. Was each critical step corrrectly anticpated and planned for by the team and the person at the touch point of the critical step? Did they execute as expected without any unplanned release of energy or unplanned change of mass or unplanned release of data during the irreversible critical step? When first bringing the disicpline of the critical step into an organization, one of the best primers for organizations and individuals is from the man who wrote the book on the importance of critical steps, Tony Muschara:

Learn About Critical Steps
Ref: CRITICAL STEPS: HOW TO IDENTIFY AND MANAGE THE MOST IMPORTANT HUMAN PERFORMANCE RISKS IN OPERATIONS, Tony Muschara, CPT, Performance Improvement, vol. 53, no. 9, October 2014 ©2014 International Society for Performance Improvement, Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pfi.21437

How to Use the Tools

Now that you understand the three different classes of tools it is easy to start using the tools to help you write a new pre-job brief or just update an existing one.

Ideally each class of tool should match a major area of your pre-job brief. You may want to consider having three major areas in your pre-job brief: OSHA, Good Practices and Human Performance.

Within a particular area you would then begin to add sections for different tools that you are going to use. For example, in your OSHA Requirements area you might want to have the following sections: Hazards, PPE, Work Procedures, Energized Source Control

Finally you might want to use one last grouping of sub sections for different parts of particular tool that you intend to use. For example, in your OSHA Requirements area, in the Hazards section you might want to have the following sub sections: Gravity, Electricity, Mechanical Energy (kinetic), Mechancial Energy (potential), Chemical, Environment, Weather and Ergonomic.

Once you have these final sub-sections setup it is just a matter of using the tools in the Pre-Job Brief Toolbox to pick and choose the items that you feel are appropriate for each sub section to meet the requirments of the pre-job brief that you are writing or updating. For example, as you browse the Electricity part of the Hazards tool you would pick and choose the appropriate electrical hazards that match the task you are writing the pre-job brief for.

You would then go on to browse the Personal Protective Equipment tool to choose the appropriate PPE to add to your PPE section. Since you now have all available Hazards as well as all avaibable PPE right in front of you it should be easier to you to write a more task specific and complete pre-job brief. You then repeat this process using the matching tool for all three sections of your pre-job brief: OSHA, Good Practices, Human Performance.

Use Case Scenarios

Use Case One:
Updating a Pre-Job Brief after a Near Miss or Event

Usually after a significant event one of the findings is that the pre-job or pre-task brief(s) could use some improvement. At an unnamed utility when ever they are going to review and improve a pre-job brief they use two fundamentals: 1) A process for revieing and improving the pre-job brief. 2) A new job hazard analyis is undertaken.

The process part is arduous because it in order to get this done different groups across the organization must all be a part and have their say. The groups have different backgrounds and experience levels with pre-job briefings. Some are concerned about the content of the pre-job brief. Other groups are concerned about what colors are used on the form. When the request is sent out to each group they are given the current pre-job brief along with the website link to the Pre-Job Brief Toolbox. The PJB Toolbox helps to "educate or refresh" all of the different groups quickly so they can all be informed of what other utilities across the united states are doing from a good practices perspective. This helps the whole process to move just a little bit more smoothly because the communitation between the groups is referenced PJB Toolbox's colletion of PJBs and good practices from across the industry.

Use Case Two:
Adding Human Performance to an Existing Pre-Job Brief

At another unamed Utility they have been using a Pre-Job Brief form for a long time and everyone agrees that it is really needs to be updated and made current. As part of the updating process the Compliance team wants to apply newly learned Human Performance knowledge into the Pre-Job Brief. The core of Human Performance reduces errors at the individual level while managing internal controls that identify and remove latent hazards that are inadvertantly created by an organization as part of its normal business model.

The Utility is using the PJB Toolbox to see how other utilites are using Human Performance as a part of the pre-job brief. Since the workforce in the Utility already uses the pre-job brief it is more natural to add human performance into the pre-job brief and teach the workforce human peformance in the context of giving more effective pre-job briefs that truely are desgined to elimate catastrophic events.

The Tools

Meet The Team

The Pre-Job Brief Toolbox team is made up of a group of volunteers who do the work (Analysts) and a few really great Advisors.

Analysts

Lisa Umeda

City of Vernon

Ward Andrews

Wilson Construction

Norman Szczepanski

Sacramento Utility District (SMUD)

Tom Neary

OpCon Technologies

Advisors

Ron Fenex

Central Arizona Project (CAP)

Kevin Harris

Eversource Energy

Wally Groff

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA)

Terry Morford

Morford Energy Consulting