Effective Safety Training Tips
Below are some tips you can use to make your safety training more effective. If you follow these tips, you’ll definitely be heading in the right direction.
You’ll notice the first two steps aren’t directly related to safety TRAINING but to safety in general. But we think you’ll agree they’re logical starting points.
The first thing to do is inspect the workplace for hazards. Your safety training won’t be very good unless you know the hazards you’re trying to protect your workers from.
Performing a job hazard analysis is a great way to get started. During a JHA, a team of people investigate a work area and look for hazards associated with a particular job. They’ll then work to control those hazards, a point we’ll get to shortly.
For more about this, you can read our entire article about the job hazard analysis (JHA). There’s even a free guide there waiting for you.
It’s good to do a JHA and identify your hazards. But it’s even better to control your hazards. If you don’t talk “Safety Manager 101,” that means to make the workplace safer by eliminating or reducing the hazards.
How does that make your safety training better? By removing the need for safety training! It’s always better to eliminate or control a hazard than it is to train workers to be safe in the presence of a hazard.
You can use the hierarchy of controls to help control those hazards. The hierarchy of controls gives you a simple pattern to use when trying to control hazards. First, try elimination. Next, try substitution. Third, try engineering controls. Fourth, try work practice controls. And fifth, try PPE.
Note that PPE is always a last resort. Also, know that in some cases you may use more than one type of controls in combination (for example, an engineering control and PPE).
You should also know the safety training requirements that regulatory agencies like OSHA or MSHA place on your work site.
First, because the law’s the law, and compliance with the law is a good thing. But also because safety training regulations (a) help you make sure you’re not overlooking something and (b) help you set a “baseline minimum” for training that you can then then exceed with your own training.
Here’s a website where OSHA identifies its safety training requirements. And here are the MSHA Part 46 and Part 48 safety training requirements.
Remember that this is about setting a minimum standard for your safety training. Always think of regulation as the bottom level of what you’re shooting for, not the peak.
It’s a good idea to follow a proven, trusted method for delivering your safety training. If you haven’t heard of ANSI Z490.1, the national standard for accepted EHS training practices, now’s a good time to get familiar with it. The standard provides a step-by-step method for safety trainers like you.
For more about this, here’s a free 60-page Guide to Effective EHS Training that we created. You can download it anytime you want. It serves as an introduction to ANSI Z490.1. and you can use at work to help implement Z490.1.
Don’t rely on just one training delivery method, such as online learning, instructor-led training, or field-based training for all of your safety training.
Instead, ANSI Z490.1 suggests you use a “blended learning” solution. That means you’ll use different training delivery methods for different training needs. So maybe you’ll use online learning for one safety topic and classroom-style training for another safety topic, or maybe you’ll use both online training and instructor-led training for the same safety training topic.
For example, you might use an online eLearning course for your Emergency Action Plan training and use an instructor-led class for your respiratory protection training.
Or, maybe you’ll “blend” training delivery methods for one training need. For example, maybe you’ll use an online eLearning course to introduce some of the issues in respiratory protection, and then follow-up with an instructor-led session to handle questions, provide feedback, perform demonstrations, and check your employee’s use of respirators.
Early in the process of designing training, you’ll want to create a set of learning objectives.
Your learning objectives are the things you want your employees to do on their job as a result of your training. It’s the whole point of delivering safety training–because you want people to work safely after the training is done.
If you create learning objectives correctly for your basic safety topic (for example, to lock and tagout machinery before performing maintenance), you can then design your training to teach employees to perform those actions and create tests that evaluate if employees can perform those actions during training. So in short, your learning objectives are what everything else in your training supports.
There’s a much better chance that your employees will “get” your safety training, and it will be effective, if you create training with their characteristics in mind.
What are there work schedules? Do they prefer classroom-style training or training in the field? Do they like to start training with some eLearning and then talk about it as a group? Are they comfortable with written material, or is that a struggle for them? What is their level of previous knowledge on the topic? What existing knowledge can you use to make comparisons while introducing new knowledge?
The more you know about your employees, the more effective your training will be. And the safer your workplace will be as a result.
Employees pay attention to training and care about it if they know why it’s important for them.
If you start by explaining how the training is related to their jobs, and how it will help to keep them safer, you’re off to a good start. If you don’t do this, and you leave the employees wondering why they should care, they probably won’t.
And remember to design the training so it’s focused on how your workers actually work. Don’t provide one-sized fits all safety training to all employees. When you do that, it means some employees will almost by definition by completing safety training that has nothing to do with their job. As you’d guess, they’ll tune out.
And finally, keep the safety training task-specific. Make sure it’s directly relevant to job tasks the employee performs on the job. Avoid simply reading off a safety regulation–that’s too abstract. Make it personal.
One of those adult learning principles we talked about earlier is the importance of active learning. The idea is that people don’t learn by passively sitting and listening to a lecture. Instead, they learn when they’re being active.
This can mean having employees lead the training session, actively participating in a Q&A session, sharing their thoughts and experiences, performing hands-on training, and similar “active” methods of learning. If you design training knowing that it’s important for the workers to be active participants, they’ll get more out of it and you’ll have a safer work place.
The “What’s in it for me?” issue, the importance of providing training that’s job-based and task-based, and active learning are all part of what learning experts call adult learning principles.
Adult learning principles are things that make adults more likely to learn, as you might have guessed. If your training includes these adult learning principles, it’s going to be more effective and lead to a safer work place than safety training that doesn’t appeal to adult learning principles.
When you write training materials, or when you’re speaking during a training session, it’s important to use the right kind of language.
And for effective training, that means a few things. Primarily, of course, it means delivering training in a language your workers understand. If you have a multi-lingual workforce, providing safety training in multiple languages can be a challenge but is important.
But beyond the issue of speaking in a language your worker understands, this also means using casual, conversational language. The kind that the employees themselves use when they talk. Don’t fall into the trap of providing safety training in overly formal, academic language.
We’re visual creatures. Most of the information that comes to us comes from our eyes. And so it’s no surprise that training with good visuals (pictures, movies, real-life objects, etc.) can be very effective.
Even better, many studies show that training that includes well-designed visuals and words together is even more effective–this is because our brains have two “processing centers,” one for images and one for words.
Humans can only keep a small amount of information in our working memory at one time. Maybe only four bits of information at one time. That’s not a lot, is it?
Plus, if a person doesn’t move that new information into long-term memory quickly, it simply disappears and is forgotten or lost. This happens in a very short time period–as quickly as 15 seconds.
If you give your workers more than that to handle, they’ll get overwhelmed and nothing you want them to learn will “stick.” This is known as cognitive overload.
The solution to these challenges is to organize your training into tiny, bite-sized “chunks.” (Yep, that’s what it’s called in learning and development.) Doing this will give your workers a better chance of retaining the information.
Training is good. But it’s also important to test employees to make sure they understand the important concepts or that they can demonstrate how to perform job tasks safely BEFORE you send them out on the floor to work.
Don’t forget to test or otherwise assess the skills and knowledge of workers as part of safety training–without it, you’re only hoping people have learned.
Testing is a good way to determine if workers understood the training. It’s also a good compliance measure if a regulator later asks how you determined if people understood training. But beyond that, testing is also good because it supports learning–this is called the testing effect.
And here’s one last thing you want to know about effective safety training. To know if it’s effective or not, you’ve got to evaluate the results–you can’t just assume it worked. Get out in the field and observe behaviors and see what workers are doing. Check your near-miss numbers and your injury/illness/incident counts. Make sure your training is having the effect you’re hoping for.
If you can get data of key performance indicators (KPIs) for safety both before and after training is held, that allows you to compare your data. You can then use the comparison to see if the safety training was effective. Here’s an article about training and KPIs.