Regular employee training is a critical process for organizations committed to workplace safety and minimizing losses, including group captive member-companies. The challenge is keeping safety meetings interesting and actionable over the long haul. But it’s not an insurmountable challenge, according to Judy Trent, Training Division Coordinator for DiVal Safety Equipment in Buffalo, NY. During Captive Resources’ May Risk Control Webinar, Trent gave safety leaders many fresh ideas for making safety meetings more memorable and effective.
Trent, who has more than 30 years of safety training and compliance experience, indicated that employees are not to blame for ineffective safety meetings. On the contrary, she pointed out, adults want to learn so they can apply their own experience to their learning and be more successful. But they need to be in control of their learning and know why they’re being trained on certain safety topics. If those conditions are met, they can better apply their new knowledge to immediate real-life challenges.
Here are a few concepts Trent shared to help safety leaders take advantage of employees’ desire to learn in order to improve safety meeting effectiveness.
Trent, a featured presenter at conferences for national and regional associations, including the National Safety Council (NSC), pointed out that humans retain only 10 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they hear, and 30 percent of ideas they interpret visually 72 hours after training, according to research. Retention is much higher when people combine seeing and hearing (50 percent), talking (70 percent), and combine saying and doing (90 percent). Considering these data points, Trent stressed the importance of incorporating multi-sensory learning into safety training.
Although familiar lecture and PowerPoint formats have value and suit some meetings, trainers have other options, Trent said. Making training experiential takes advantage of the typical adult’s natural competitiveness and boosts learning retention. Game formats can be highly effective, she said, mentioning two that have worked particularly well for training meetings:
Regardless of the format, the presenter can use wrong answers as an opportunity to explain the correct answers in depth, Trent said.
Another approach to training that maximizes learning retention is hands-on games such as a Powered Industrial Truck Rodeo, Trent added. She pointed out that some jobs require employees to operate powered industrial trucks. Competitive training events with qualified employee demonstrations of safe machine operation facilitate peer-to-peer evaluation.
The more safety leaders can help employees see “what’s in it for them” in safe work practices, the more engaged they’ll be, Trent stressed. She noted that relating on-the-job safety to why people work — so they can enjoy their families and free time — significantly increases employees’ attention. For example, free-time activities such as hunting and doing yardwork carry risks. Starting conversations around making these activities safer breaks the ice and motivates safe employee behaviors on and off the job, Trent said.
This presentation was part of Captive Resources’ Risk Control Webinar Series — regular installments of webinars to educate the group captive members we work with on topics like workplace safety, organizational leadership, and company performance. The thoughts and opinions expressed in these webinars are those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect Captive Resources’ positions on any of the above topics.
