As you plan safety meetings and other safety training sessions, be sure think about the diverse factors represented in your workforce.
There are many differences among employees in your workforce, and some of these differences can present a challenge when it’s time for safety training. To ensure effective training, you need to take these diverse factors into account and tailor training to the training group.
Age. Younger workers may have trouble taking their jobs, including the safety aspects, seriously. Older workers, on the other hand, may feel they already know it all and tune you out. Your approach will have to include ways to make it clear to trainees that this is important to all of them, perhaps with dramatic examples of safety failures involving different age groups.
Ability to read and understand English. Keep in mind that many people won’t admit they can’t read or understand English. Be alert to your workers’ ability—or inability—to understand written instructions and to comprehend English. Don’t embarrass them; just be sure you are presenting information in a way they can grasp. In April, 2010, OSHA issued an enforcement memorandum directed at protecting Latino and other non-English speaking workers from workplace hazards. It directs compliance officers to ensure they check and verify that workers are receiving OSHA-required training in a language they understand. When training non-English-speaking employees, it may be helpful to involve an additional meeting leader who speaks the workers’ native language, if you do not.
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Educational level. If your group includes workers with a wide range of educational backgrounds, your task is even more complicated. You have to come up with an approach that gets the message across to the less educated without being so simplistic that it turns off other workers. You may need to use more demonstration and practice than reading and lectures. You’ll also have to make an effort to use words and concepts all trainees can understand.
Experience with products, processes, and technology. Again, you have to tailor your message to your audience. If workers are relatively inexperienced, you’ll have to take a slow, step-by-step approach and limit each safety meeting to a very narrow topic area. Otherwise, you’ll overload participants with more than they can take in at once. Experienced workers will more readily understand your references to equipment and procedures, allowing you to focus more on the safety aspects and tie them together. But experienced workers are also more likely to resist changes in the way they do their jobs, so you’ll have to sell them on safety both in terms of their own health and well-being and regulatory requirements.
Tolerance for length and frequency of meetings. How long an attention span do your workers have? How long can they sit still and concentrate? How much can they absorb at once? You’ll have to answer these questions to determine how often you can have safety meetings and how long they can last. The meeting format is also a factor in determining meeting length. People can’t usually sit and concentrate as long for lectures as for videos or programs that involve them directly in practice. Another factor is how long you can keep how many workers off the job without seriously disrupting operations and upsetting deadlines.
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Extent of prior safety training. The more safety training workers have received, the easier each subsequent meeting becomes. Once workers understand certain safety basics and incorporate them into their jobs and workstyles, it’s not as difficult to add new cautions and procedures. You can skip the preliminaries and some of the “safety sell” and get right to the specifics of your meeting.
Attitudes toward work and management. If you have many workers who are hostile to you, the company, their jobs, and/or the meeting topic, safety meetings can be stressful. These workers will attend meetings only because they have to and will be reluctant participants in discussions and practice sessions. If you have this problem, face it squarely at the beginning of the session. Allow workers to express their feelings and ask them to try to keep an open mind. Again, your best bet here is to emphasize that their safety is important to you and that these programs will benefit them by making accidents and injuries less likely. It also doesn’t hurt to point out that the same regulations that require companies to provide safety training also require employees to practice the safety methods and practices they’ve been taught on the job.