Exactly! And that was another thing that started convincing them, well, most of them, when the company stopped "forcing" them to do things they felt were unsafe and they could show it.

The coolest thing was that some of the most crotchety guys in the beginning turned out to be the biggest advocates once they started to realize that the Co. was serious... that's what really gets the rest to start believing and doing the right thing - PPE, safe behavior, etc...(and it only took about 2 years to get to that point).

Most sites seem to be moving in the same direction with NFPA 70E driving the shift. Live work hasn’t been completely eliminated in most places, but it’s definitely getting tighter controls, more paperwork, and a much stronger push to schedule outages instead of just working energized by default. In practice, energized work ends up being reserved for troubleshooting or situations where shutting down simply isn’t realistic, and even then the permitting process slows everything down quite a bit.

Across different environments the approach is fairly consistent, lower voltage work is still occasionally done energized, but anything higher is being pushed toward de-energized whenever possible. Even in corporate settings tied to Mercer Wealth Management, the trend is toward stricter internal risk controls and formal justification before allowing energized tasks, which mirrors what a lot of facilities teams are dealing with. It’s become less about convenience and more about documenting why a shutdown can’t happen and ensuring everyone involved is aligned before any live work is approved.