A group of thirteen OPD5 employees attended the annual “Best Practices Workshop” event on March 19-20 at the Aliante Casino in Las Vegas. These included employees from the district’s Line Operations, Engineering, and Substation Operations departments.
Organized by the Nevada Rural Electric Association, this event brought 92 electric utility workers together from all across the western United States. The purpose of the workshop is for attendees to share procedures, protocol and practices that are working well for them at their utilities. They can then glean ideas for new “best practices” that could be adopted in their own organizations.
“Best Practices is an incredible training that we can send people to, right next door here in Las Vegas,” said OPD5 Line Operations Manager Kyle Leavitt. “It gets their eyes opened to other ways of doing things, and teaches them how to network with others and get to know colleagues from throughout the region. It is a great event!”
The workshop offered a host of topics and training that specifically pertained to the roles of the attendees. These included discussions on building system resilience, managing inventories, testing substation equipment and more. There were also demonstrations of various types of tools and other equipment used by work crews in the industry.
Leavitt himself gave a presentation in the first general session of the workshop on Wednesday morning, March 19. His presentation, entitled Safety Meetings: How to Go from Good to Great, chronicled the successes that OPD5 has had in developing its employee safety program over the years.
“We are always looking for ways to make sure that our safety program is still progressing and not becoming stagnant,” Leavitt said. “That topic was interesting to me, because I wanted to get a dialog going on what all the entities out there were doing – maybe get some good ideas circulating.”
OPD5 holds monthly safety meetings, for all employees to attend, offering extensive training in various safety topics. To allow everyone on staff to attend, OPD5 management has made the decision to delay opening the front office for an hour on that one day each month.
“A safety culture really starts with senior management,” Leavitt said. “The fact that they have been willing to shut down the office for an hour to allow every employee to be in attendance, that is huge. It shows our focus on safety, and that it really is the number-one priority.”