Consider these two manufacturing plants, roughly the same size and located within 50 miles of each other in central Tennessee. Let’s call them Beta and Zeta.
Beta has a comprehensive safety training program, covering everything in detail. Each employee goes twice a year to a full-day class on site. The first class covers general safety, and the second covers rules specific to that employee’s job function. So, for example, the electricians and the mechanics have different material for their second class. The class consists of lectures, slides, and a Q&A.
At Zeta, employees attend a weekly “safety talk” conducted by their immediate supervisor. It’s usually completed in ten minutes. These are required to cover specific topics in any given year, but the talks are not particularly structured. A lot of detail gets left out — and there is no special session for a given trade; it is individualized.
For job-specific training, a given employee gets “certified” in a given area of safety (e.g., lockout/tagout) with whatever training is necessary to pass an oral exam and practical demonstration. Each employee is required to recertify after three years.
Which plant do you think has the better safety record? It’s got to be Beta, which covers everything right? Not exactly. People can focus their attention for only so long and can retain only so much information. Beta is having its employees drink from a fire hose. People walk out of those safety training sessions dazed and unsure of what they just heard and saw. A consultant asked three attendees 10 questions from the material, and they got fewer than half of them right.
At Zeta, the same consultant couldn’t come up with ten questions from the material of a safety talk because it was narrowly focused and only 10 minutes long. So he went with three, and the four attendees he asked got them all right. Even when he asked them questions about details not given in the training, they were able to answer nearly all of the questions correctly. The reason is their training focused on principles, not memorization of facts and procedures. They could remember and understand the principles because they got them in small, frequent doses. Applying some logic, they were usually able to fill in the correct details.
Beta’s approach is to check off all the boxes and get things over with. Their stated reason for those marathon safety training sessions was that employees didn’t like the classes. They didn’t stop to think that the reason might be the classes are too long. Detail can quickly become mind numbing, driving retention to zero. Just because a person endured that long session and signed his name on an attendance sheet does not mean he learned anything.
Safety training is not about how much information the trainer can put out — it’s about how much understanding the trainee comes away with.
