SP : Safety Training Is a Sound Investment

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Chapter : Safety Training

Safety Training Is a Sound Investment

There's a direct relationship between an organization's training programs and its growth, competitiveness, safety record, and financial success. 

Here are some reasons training in general, and safety training in particular, is a good investment:

• 
  Safety training reduces accidents and protects employees from injuries and illness, saving the company the cost of lost time, diminished productivity, and increased insurance premiums.
• Training also assists in compliance with OSH standards and decreases the chance of being cited and fined for safety and health violations.
• Training in general increases employee job satisfaction, motivation, and morale.
• Happy, motivated, safe, and well-trained employees are loyal employees, which means turnover goes down.
• Employee training and development provides you with a pool of skilled and knowledgeable people who can move up in the organization and fill critical jobs and perform critical functions.
• Training helps your organization ride the crest of technological change and innovation.
• Well-trained, highly skilled employees are more efficient, productive, and creative.
• Training helps you manage risks such as sexual harassment, workplace violence, and discrimination.
• A trained workforce provides the human resources to expand into new markets and seize opportunities in a highly competitive and fluid global economy.
• Training helps develop a positive organizational culture in which confident, knowledgeable, creative employees are poised to provide superior products and services to customers.

Keep Your Refresher Training Fresh

Periodic refresher training is required by many Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards. And even when it isn't, refresher training is essential for keeping skills sharp and preventing a dangerous sense of complacency. Varying your techniques during refresher training will keep learners engaged. Do you dread doing yet another refresher training session on an oft-repeated topic?

Here are a few suggestions on how to accomplish this:

• Do a demonstration (e.g., demonstrate the effectiveness of a steel-toe shoe by dropping a weight on it).
• Incorporate real-life accident or near-miss stories.
• Have learners pair off and do an activity, such as a joint lift of a heavy object.
• Show slides of different work areas, equipment, and operations related to your topic, and ask learners to identify any hazards they see as the slides click by. This “safety scanning” technique encourages and trains employees to continuously look out for hazards.
• Send trainees on a workplace scavenger hunt to look for and record as many hazards as they can find.
• Bring in props that learners can see and touch, such as a damaged tool that is unsafe, a hazardous chemical container that is missing a label, or samples of personal protective equipment (PPE) for inspection.

Why It Matters

• By its very nature as repeated material, refresher training can be an activity that workers feel is unnecessary.
• If workers feel they don’t need this training again, they may engage in presenteeism (i.e. being present at training sessions but not paying attention).
• You need to overcome this bad attitude by impressing on workers that the very reason refresher training is needed is that the topics are serious enough to merit reminders and verifications that workers know how to work safely in these operations or on this equipment.

Ways to Increase Training Payback

To make sure your employee training is always successful and cost-effective whether you're training for safety or to develop other critical competencies you need to:

• Make training on ongoing process, and reassess training needs frequently to make sure you're meeting today's needs, not yesterday's.
• Encourage employees to talk about their training needs and request additional training.
• Provide employees with opportunities to use newly learned skills on the job.
• Make sure your training is comprehensive, interesting, and interactive, and gives employees the chance to practice new skills in a safe setting.
• Send employees back to work with learning aids such as checklists, step-by-step instructions, and safety reminders that help them safely and effectively transfer newly learned skills to their job.