By Jack Rubinger, freelance writer

For Frank Quarato, a safety trainer, safety touches on the heart, mind, body and soul. He’s been teaching and preaching safety for many years, but when he was new to the training industry, he had a lot to learn about working with people, particularly forklift operators.

In one situation, an operator in a training session told Quarato, “What are you going to tell me that I don’t already know?”

In that situation, Quarato turned the tables and asked the veteran forklift operator to lead the session because he was the more experienced of the two. “I learned from going out on the floor with him. The lesson? We don’t learn until the moment is right,” said Quarato, founder of The Center for Safety & Environmental Management.

Quarato talked about the fear we sometimes face when we’re looking at the plight of another person. Our minds may be saying ‘that’s not me, that doesn’t apply to me.’”

He also spoke about getting a false read in potentially dangerous situations and shared a story about a worker forgetting to turn on the blower on a confined space monitor to pull out toxic gases. The worker was so focused on just having the equipment there, which gave him a false sense of security, and in the process forgot to turn it on.

Quarato turned the conversation to the value of checklists, so we don’t go into automatic pilot during dangerous situations. He spoke of the brain telling you one thing when the actual reality is another.

Finally, he suggested that communication should be adjusted to match different personality types, including dominant people (talk to them in bullets), intellectuals (use statistics and data to make your point), sensitive people (talk about what they love) and competent people (tell them a better or faster way to do their jobs).

Rather than coming into a training session with assumptions about what employees need to learn, it’s better to survey participants in advance to gauge their real knowledge levels. “It’s about discovering what they know now, then figuring out what else they need to know or be able to do,” said Jeff Dalto of Vector Solutions. Dalto has worked on ASSP/ANSI standards for Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) professionals, including the Z490 EHS training standards. He’s also a proponent of evidence-based training practices, and notes there’s no evidence that designing training to accommodate learning styles leads to better results.

The age dynamics of our ever-changing workforce also plays an important role in job site safety. According to the Pew Research organization, Millennials and Generation Z will make up 63.8% of the labor force in 2025. By 2030, they will be 74.7%. It’s almost 75%, but by then they cover the age ranges between 20-49, historically the ages with the highest labor participation.

Dalto believes the best training arises when safety professionals have relationships with the trainees in advance, and also believes that we shouldn’t think of safety from a pure compliance standpoint or isolated from organizational goals, but rather as contributing to the organization’s capacity to succeed under varying conditions.

Vector Solutions offers several training development models.

“Good trainers don’t just make things up on the fly, and if they were creating safety training they wouldn’t just look at a regulation and transfer some key parts of it to a PowerPoint presentation,” said Dalto. “Instead, they often work through models, and ADDIE is the most common one.”

Each letter in ADDIE stands for a different step or phase of the process: A for analysis, D for design, D for develop, I for implement, and E for evaluate.

Here’s a quick overview of the analysis phase of ADDIE:

• Know a business goal the training is aligned to
• Learn the actual job task the employees will perform
• Know the employee’s current ability to perform the job
• Know as much about the employees that will affect the training as you can

Only then, begin a training evaluation strategy, including finding the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that the business goal is tied to, and starting measurements of that KPI. Here’s what happens during the design phase of ADDIE:

• Write learning objectives for your training
• Determine what the employees must do to successfully complete your training
• Create tests/assessments for after training
• Select the best instructional methods
• Select the best training delivery methods
• Divide your training down into smaller, related chunks

Good visual design is also an important component that addresses the mindset of any safety situation.

According to the Center for Visual Excellence (COVE), Neuroscience and Research reveals that most — as much as 90% — of what you think you see is actually your brain filling in the blanks based on bias, memory and past experiences.

“It is essential for older employees or leaders to learn the effectiveness of strong communication that supports understanding and competency,” said Von Griggs-Laws, Griggs Safety Consultants. “In the process, they may also learn how to provide feedback, resolve conflicts, and enhance morale by building teams that will engage & support workplace profitability to lessen recordable incidents and liabilities overall,” she said.

Companies looking to improve Environmental Health and Safety processes should adopt tailored learning, mindset and relationship development to help enhance hazard recognition, decrease incident rates and train teams to engage safely with the workplace environment.

While we used to look at training in a silo, and what was good for one is good for all, we’re realizing that as individuals, our learning habits and thinking processes are very different. How do we best capture the common denominator that will create the largest benefit for all employees? The best trainers are able to work with all types of employees and have the right message to the right person at the right time.

About the Author

Jack Rubinger is a freelance writer, with more than 10+ years of workplace safety and construction industry research and writing experience. Looking for an article on a specific construction topic? Contact: jackrubinger814@gmail.com or call 503-964-4877.