Safety Training

In the past few years, there has been a shift in the way that safety skills are trained in our industry. Prior to this shift, there was just rote memorization and dependence on procedures. This shift came in the form of "behavior-based safety."

Behavior-based safety is the idea that rather than an administrative control where you just "tell" an employee what to do, and other than engineering controls (ie. machine guards, railings etc.), there is a level of safety understanding that taps into employees "behavior." The philosophy is that by changing the employee's behavior in potentially dangerous situations, the organization can help ensure their safety.



One failing of this is the tremendous amount of time and financial investment that organizations have to make to get a behavior-based safety system into their organizations. Many smaller companies can't make that type of investment.



Another key element is identifying dangers on the worksite. The idea is that if a worker calls out a danger his brain won't let him put himself into a dangerous area without fixing it. A corollary to this is coming about in terms of "personalizing" safety. Before work, identifying those people who would be adversely affected if the worker were hurt; wife, kids, etc. and then explaining why. Again the idea is that a worker won't let a catastrophic dangerous situation exist if they know their families will be the ones affected by their putting themselves into danger.



There have been amazing advances in safety training in the past twenty years in our industry. A worker from the 1990's would barely recognize the safety standards we work with now and would be immeasurably safer.