WORLD SAFETY DAY TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE TRAINING -- Classrooms Don’t Prevent Occupational Accidents: Relationships Do

Today is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, which promotes the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases. World Safety Day focuses international attention on occupational safety and health and on work-related injuries and fatalities worldwide.

This year’s World Safety Day 2011 focuses on a systematic approach for reducing workplace incidents and accidents based on the The Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle.

One of the most important parts of the PDCA Cycle is the “Do” phase in which employers train workers to recognize risks and act safely.

Profound safety learning - the kind of knowledge that becomes on-the-job behavior — happens when both employers and employees care. We need to train people in ways that 1) demonstrate how much everyone cares about safety and 2) get the trainee’s personal commitment to learn safety and then work in a safe manner.

Classroom training is by far the most popular safety training method, but studies routinely show that classroom retention is poor, sometimes as low as 15% only a month after the class. Studies also show that 80 percent of actual learning happens informally outside the classroom.

Classroom training is a factory approach to teaching. It tries to get as much information to the largest number of people in the shortest time possible without regard to retention. Classroom does not say ‘we care about you’ in a way that’s meaningful enough to influence behavior.

The most effective safety trainers are experienced workers who have the knowledge, credibility and, most important, the opportunity to persuade their coworkers to commit to act safely.

If Jose tells you he always works safely because of his wife and three children and then he shows you their pictures and tells you their names and ages, you’re much more likely to work safely around him than if you just took a class from the Corporate Safety Trainer. Retaining safety knowledge and then applying it in the real world requires making a personal commitment to yourself and your coworkers.

The solution is for companies to teach experienced employees how to be good safety mentors. While experienced employees have knowledge and experience, they typically don’t know how to effectively teach what they know to working adults, especially their peers. This should be an objective at every company -- to turn their best employees into effective safety mentors.

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