How Can you Make Sure that Your Safety Training is Effective?
What steps can be taken to ensure safety learning is transferred to the workplace?
In this country millions of dollars are spent on safety training. Businesses that are hard-nosed about expenditure do not apply the same scrutiny to the expenditure on training. In many cases, millions of dollars are spent with no evidence of results.
Basically, the transfer of learning is the application of learning back into the workplace. The evidence of this is that the learner’s safety performance will improve as a direct result of the training intervention.Learning and development professionals regard the management of the transfer process as being critical to the success of the safety training intervention. Firstly, because of the gap that exists between the undertaking of a particular training intervention and the outcomes resulting from the application of what was learned. Secondly, managing the process of transferring learning to the workplace is an opportunity for the learning and development professionals to demonstrate the value and the return on investment to the senior management level.
There are plenty of examples of people having accidents straight after a training course. The learning had taken place. But the learning had not modified the behaviour of the individual. This is an example of the gap between the information learned from the training and the subsequent behaviour.
Obviously we want our safety training programs to be successful by creating safer workplace behaviour. We want to see that there is a marked change in the way people go about their work. Ultimately, we want less accidents, less injuries and less incidents. We want all these things because we know that it is good business sense to have a safe workplace.
To achieve transfer of learning that will lead to a safer workplace we must take into account two vital factors.
The first factor to be considered is the method of training. It’s not enough for people just have an intellectual understanding of safety. We know that this cognitive knowledge will not change behavior.
The difference is crucial between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. For years we have been training people to develop declarative knowledge when we should have been training them in procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is knowing a concept and its technical details. On the other hand procedural knowledge is being able to put the concepts and the details into action. Knowing does not equal doing in safety.
Having a cognitive realization about what to do does not indicate a person’s readiness to do things differently. It doesn’t help motivation or capacity to do things in a safe fashion. We have been tending to consider all training the same without regard to the purpose of the training of the type of learning involved. Declarative knowledge may be sufficient for cognitive and technical competence but not for important areas like safety.
The easiest approach is to train about a competence so that employees get an intellectual grasp of the concepts. However, it has the least effect on actually changing performance. This sort of understanding is a part of learning but is only the first step and will not create lasting change
Technical training is relatively easy in comparison to developing the emotional competence necessary to bring about a change in behavior. Furthermore, cognitive abilities are based in the neo-cortex whereas the emotional and social competencies are centered in different parts of the brain. They operate in the circuitry that runs from the amygdala in the centre of the brain up to the prefrontal lobes which are the brain’s executive centre.
Behavioral change training is completely different to cognitive learning and the models of learning and development are also completely different. However, we have been using the wrong one for many years. For intellectual skills, the classroom setting is appropriate. By simply reading about or hearing or discussing the concept can be enough to master it. Planning techniques, computer programming, and accountancy can be learned in this fashion. Behavior change on the other hand, can only be learned in a practical life environment. And skill in this area can only be developed through practice over a period of time.
To learn and develop skills in the area of safety requires us to engage our brain where our social and emotional habits are stored. Learning to interact with people, developing our listening skills, giving feedback skilfully, applying techniques of encouragement and positive reinforcement is a much more challenging task then building up a bank of facts. This sort of emotional learning requires a much more profound change at the neurological level as existing habits of behavior are replaced by better ones.
We keep making mistakes by trying to develop safety using the same techniques that we use to teach people how to plan their work.
Each year millions of dollars are wasted on safety training because the programs have no lasting impact and are not reflected in the workplace changes.
If you want more information on training, learning and the development of a safe working culture in your workplaces don’t hesitate to ask me peter@thelearning.co.nz
This site is updated daily as more information is added.
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