How many times have you paused before entering a high-noise area to put in your hearing protection, only to get strange looks like, “WTH is taking you so long?”
Most workers and even a fair amount of safety professionals do not understand the “subtract 7” approach when performing the attenuation evaluation. The “subtract 7” approach is because the actual NRR assigned to that HP is established in laboratory conditions. In the real world, workers almost never insert their earplugs properly, leaving the safety professional(s) to be the “slow-poke.” In my years, I have seen some very creative ways for workers to use their HP and 100% of them the HP might as well have not even been used.
I am even amazed at how few of the times this unsafe behavior is recognized during BBS events. And when I dig into this, I find that everyone has been trained and that training demonstrated the proper way to roll, lift, and insert. These “chronic” hazards/risks are the hardest to get workers and management to recognize and address.