Safety + Health Magazine - January 2025
By: Shawn M. Galloway
Printable Version
What are some creative tactics employers have deployed to improve the effectiveness of their training and education efforts?
Besides leveraging the obvious technological advancements of gamification, virtual reality, and AI, here are some creative approaches I’ve been a part of in four categories: Sticky, Mentor Coaches, Ownership Transfer, and Practiced Recovery.
Stickiness: A government client with 40,000 people to care for and various complex risks started questioning the efficacy of their training and education efforts. With thirty major safety programs, they went to each subject matter expert, identified the three most important things someone should know about each, and turned this into a quiz. The results? Most people didn’t know the most important things, regardless of the amount of training, education, and communication. This led the organization to develop two new leading indicators, Employee and Leadership Safety IQ, and better-focused development and increased accountability for trainers, which resulted in a significant increase in ROI.
Mentor Coaches: A utility client facing the need to transfer knowledge and operational experience to many new employees on power line crews brought back several influential retired workers willing to work part-time to ride with crews and coach them in their jobs. A mining client with many new supervisors hired an ex-MSHA inspector a few days a week to work with the new supervisors to teach them how to see safety through the eyes of MSHA and provided feedback as the leaders started to improve how they manage safety expectations with their crews.
Ownership Transfer: A manufacturing client facing significant employee turnover due to COVID-19 collaborated with seasoned and well-regarded employees who exhibited strong ownership of safe work. Together, they developed best practices for performing tasks safely and efficiently and precisely how to respond to upset conditions or when work wasn’t going to plan. For each department area, a list of the “Top 5 Risks We Never Take and the Five Precautions We Do” were identified and used as training guides and visual aids throughout the plant. A competition was held for which group had the highest percentage of employees who could recite the items from the list from memory.
Practiced Recovery: A construction client recognizing the need to be just as good at recovering from injuries as preventing them, tested the effectiveness of how well crews responded to injury events. Safety professionals who were already on site, would surreptitiously stage a dummy and an injury event and injured “dummy” and call out the code for “Man Down” to assess how the individuals on site responded. The workforce knew these would occur at some point throughout the project; however, only the safety department knew precisely when these drills would take place. After the drill, the team would be provided feedback and discuss lessons learned.
The best part of each of these examples is that the ideas for each effort came from the workforce. I often find the correct answers on how to improve training and education usually exist within the organization; you just have to ask the right questions.
Shawn M. Galloway is the CEO of ProAct Safety and co-author of several bestselling books. As an award-winning consultant, adviser, leadership coach and keynote speaker, he has helped hundreds of organizations within every major industry to improve safety strategy, culture, leadership and engagement. He is also the host of the highly acclaimed weekly podcast series Safety Culture Excellence®.
For more information, call (936) 273-8700 or email info@ProActSafety.com.
