Lack of Communication = Past Due

 

People Factors – “Communication”

        I currently am a Safety/Industrial Engineering at a company in the Dayton area. I was put in charge of various task throughout the company that deal with safety and some of these responsibilities include permits received from the government, in particular, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

        The particular permit where we ran into a problem with was our paint booth permit. In order to maintain legal operation of our booth we had to stay under certain Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) emissions on a day to day, month to month, and yearly basis. This permit was obtained by another employee at the company that was in charge of many others tasks during our addition of a new warehouse facility. After obtaining the permit, it required us to submit a yearly review of our VOC emissions that had to be sent in to the EPA. This detail was overlooked since the employee moved to a different department in charge of new responsibilities. I did catch this mistake even though we were 6 months late in submitting the document thankfully. If the employee would have communicated better and told someone else that they had to submit this evaluation we would have not run into the issue of being late and facing potential fines from the EPA.

        It is as simple as keeping a document with a master schedule of due dates for various permits and communicating these dates and document with all affected employees. Communication solves 90% of all problems in my opinion. I am just an intern though, what do I know?

~RR