Unleashing the Power of a Human Performance Mindset to Ensure the Next Generation Utility Workforce

Establishing a human performance mindset begins on an employee’s first day and must continually be reinforced and practiced through training over a career. To be successful, it’s critical that human performance learning take place in-person. While and organization may view taking an engineer or technician off project work in the field as in efficient or costly, e-learning or online course work is not a good tradeoff to the benefits of in-person discussions when it comes to establishing a human performance culture. Reviewing mistakes and lessons learned in a classroom allows an instructor to gauge the room, to look employees in the eye, and assess who is really understanding the concepts or the severity of the outcomes if repeated. Being together in-person is the best way to determine what employees are getting out of the training and what they are taking away to help them work safer and more efficiently.

Pairing classroom work with real-life, hands-on examples in a non-project setting is an excellent way to safely practice what critical concepts taught in training. It helps reinforce proper procedure and is a great opportunity to understand, in practice, how (and when) to leverage human performance mindset tools. It’s also a perfect way to get real-time critiques and reviews from instructors or more experienced engineers before going out into the field.

Ensuring and sustaining a culture of human performance can’t happen without active leadership involvement and advocacy. Best practices for corporate and operational leaders include actively sharing their own stories and experiences of on-the-job mistakes to highlight that careers can recover; employees can continue to advance and that only by sharing can others learn what to avoid or what to do better. Interaction and examples are very impactful and can help establish credibility with employees in the field.

A hugely important, but often overlooked component of building a human performance culture is formalizing peer reviews and knowledge transfer opportunities. This applies not only to new employees but experienced engineers as well. While it may be difficult for a senior employee to have his or her work reviewed, it can be very helpful to mitigate mistakes and reinforce the human performance mindset. A person may conceptually know what to do, but overconfidence or short cuts may lead to trouble in execution or implementation. The third-party peer review process also introduces the important “questioning attitude” that is so helpful in a human performance mindset.

In a work environment where employees fear retribution for making honest mistakes, there is little opportunity to learn from past experiences and make adjustments that can improve safety and efficiency. A robust peer review program, sponsored by top leadership addresses this cultural challenge. It normalizes the practice of critical feedback and helps all employees feel comfortable speaking up without the fear of retribution and opens up the lines of communications across all levels.

There is always room to improve the policies, procedures and checklists that guide engineers and technicians on how to perform field tasks. Incorporating human performance principles into process documentation can serve as guideposts and speedbumps that help employees actively think about safety and how to reduce incidents. Establishing an incident investigation process for supervisors is also helpful to reinforce human performance principles. Documenting steps to determine not just the root of the problem, but what actions or behaviors led to up to it, and procedures to share lessons learned is critical. Written documentation is helpful to mitigate mistakes for all levels of employees. It can prevent experienced engineers and new employees from taking dangerous shortcuts or just simply supply all the proper guidance they may not have previously had.