Helping Utilities Build Safer, Smarter Operations—From the Ground Up
Experience
ScottMadden is a management consulting firm with over 40 years of deep, hands-on experience. We deliver an array of consulting services across the energy utility ecosystem.
Scope & Expertise
Our knowledge, expertise, and experience are unmatched—no other firm has helped more energy clients with more unique solutions.
Safety Services
We develop and implement comprehensive safety programs that integrate workforce training and monitoring systems to drive continuous performance improvement.
Watch our video as Luke Martin, Partner at ScottMadden, explains how the firm’s deep experience across generation, nuclear, transmission, and distribution drives targeted improvements in utility performance and safety.
Key Safety Challenges in the Utility Industry
Despite advancements in safety protocols, utility companies face ongoing challenges that require innovative solutions. Here, we outline the five critical safety challenges that our clients encounter.
Building Safety Culture Beyond Compliance
Serious safety incidents continue despite decreasing numbers of incidents overall. Part of the problem is that workers follow rules only to comply rather than embracing safety as a core value, a shift that requires creating environments where every worker owns safety outcomes.
Measuring What Matters Before It Hurts
Traditional safety metrics focus on incident rates and other lagging indicators, leaving companies reactive rather than proactive in preventing workplace injuries.Enabling organizations to identify and predict incidents is critical to making safety improvements.
Skills Gap and Accelerated Training Needs
Experienced workers retire and younger workers cycle through jobs at unprecedented rates, meaning decades of hard-won field knowledge is disappearing. This creates pressure on time-to-proficiency (TTP) while making it increasingly difficult to achieve.
Making Standards Work in Practice
Corporate safety standards fail in the field due to impractical requirements or a lack of operational input. Field crews often develop dangerous workarounds when procedures fail to match reality.
Improving Training for High-Risk Tasks
Our clients continue to experience severe incidents because traditional training approaches often fail to prepare workers for real-world hazards adequately. Their workers can pass tests but fail when dealing with extreme arc-flash hazards or operating dangerous tools like chainsaws. Additionally, workers may know how to manage basic equipment but overlook crucial housekeeping requirements, such as calibration schedules, proper storage, and pre-use inspections, which can prevent catastrophic failures.
What Our Clients Are Saying
“ScottMadden has unique field experience and perspective that other consultants don’t have and/or bring to bear on their assessments.”
Safety Program Manager
– Large Investor Owned Electric and Gas Utility
Vice President
– Transmission Operations
“I’ve worked alongside a lot of consultants and contractors in my 30 years with my company, and I have never had a consultant like ScottMadden roll up their sleeves to understand how programmatic enhancements would impact the workforce in the field.”
Safety VP
– Large Investor Owner Electric and Gas Utility
“Your recommendations are practical, and cost effective, and your value to help us implement these recommendations will have a positive lasting effect on our workforce and their families.”
CEO
– Natural Gas LDC
Our Approach
Four Pillars of Safety Excellence
FIELD TO BOARDROOM CAPABILITY
We bridge the gap between frontline operations and executive strategy, translating complex field realities into actionable insights for leadership while converting boardroom initiatives into practical solutions crews actually use. This ensures safety improvements succeed at every level.
END-TO-END PROGRAM EXCELLENCE
We don’t just diagnose problems – we fix them. Our approach transforms underperforming safety programs through proven implementation methodologies. We embed ourselves in your operations and work alongside your teams to ensure lasting, measurable results.
HUMAN PERFORMANCE FOR FOUNDATIONAL SUCCESS
We bring nuclear-grade rigor to human performance fundamentals, teaching teams to prioritize proven practices that prevent incidents – proper job briefings, three-way communication, and systematic hazard recognition. By combining our expertise with AI-powered predictive analytics, we help you build sustainable safety cultures.
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE FROM DECADES OF FIELD EXPERIENCE
Our consultants blend generalists with utility safety experts who have decades of experience in T&D, nuclear operations, and high-voltage environments. This deep technical expertise in switching operations, energy isolation, and control room protocols means field personnel trust us because we understand their world.
Proven Safety Solutions
Watch our video as Luke Martin, Partner at ScottMadden, explains how NXT GEN® Training tools use AI to embed best practices, integrate safety data, and guide foremen and technicians through critical work with clarity and confidence.
