Training for Real Safety, Field Safety

Successfully training employees in safety requires some fundamental nuances in your approach

• By Robert Slocomb
• Nov 19, 2024

Let’s say you just got hired to a higher Safety position, one that requires you to up your management style. You’ve never had this big a spotlight on you before, so you’re nervous, especially since you heard your predecessor never dented the injury rate.

Clearly, you were hired to “turn safety around.” You can handle the new expectations, but the fact that you have inherited depressed staff members in a company full of difficult employees troubles you. The job just began, and you’re already doubting your superpowers.

Every day, managers take jobs they doubt they were built for. If you were honest during the interview and didn’t fudge your resume, then trust Human Resources. Safety is a people job; your interviewers obviously trust your people skills. So, first things first, explore why this company’s employees are so difficult. Perhaps it has to do with how management rules.

Workers Are Not Troops and the Role of Safety Manager Is Not a Command Position

Start by interviewing workers in the field. Go “boots on the ground” every day, but leave any prejudices and preconceptions behind. Open your eyes and ears and show a respectful attitude, no matter what you see. Be positive. Learn and remember people’s names. Ask lots of questions about job processes, then watch and learn. Get a wide picture of those you serve. Remember, you’re looking for a disconnect between field and management. Since this includes understanding your own staff, bring them along and make them useful.

Generally, to most people, safety is the neglected child in any organization. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, coming from the bottom. You have a few surprises up your sleeves — you are out to build worker trust by resolving a whole logjam of unworkable issues, and, in doing so, you plan to place safety legitimately inside this family.

Management vs. field disconnects aren’t new. They begin and end with misunderstandings about goals and expectations. One side performs the work, and the other side rules decision-making. There is plenty of room for division, so delve deep. You are on the road to understanding this firm’s unique dynamics so you can guide your department to a more beneficial position.

Work as Imagined vs. Work as Done

Safety works best when practiced from the angle of the worker. “Work as imagined” is work conceived from an office chair. Here’s a significant disconnect. If management can’t understand the creative rigors of how their workers work, then nothing flows, and safety isn’t even a consideration, let alone an afterthought. 

Work as done is what you are watching when field workers work honestly in front of you. The standard operating procedures and job safety analyses go out of focus, corners get cut, and unsafe practices abound. Yet this is work as done whether safety is here or not, and it’s precisely what you’re here to fix.

Patience is the greatest virtue of any teacher. Be that teacher. Address risks with workers by explaining their unintended consequences. Correct people without leveling crass judgment on them. Your mission is to understand why workers do what they do; then you will see where you and your staff can train away vintage misconceptions. After all, to err is human, right? So, always take the high road —
choose retraining over punishment and idle threats. In doing so,

• Be genuine about creating that safe and meaningful future you speak of daily.

• Adults need to know why they should waste their time listening to you. As hard as they were to earn, don’t depend on your credentials; just speak to what you know. 

• Disrespectful people are unsafe people. Work at gaining their trust, then retrain.

• Care, compassion, and empathy go a long way.

• Safety is not a commodity, nor is it negotiable. 

• Attitudes affect a company’s production spirit and product. Dismantle attitude.

• No one comes to work to perform poorly. Everyone comes to work to be engaged. 

• So, engage those who need a greater sense of purpose in their work.

I cannot say that I came up with this, but like a lot of safety specialists, for years, I was training the wrong side of workers’ brains. We trained the brain’s neocortex — the side governing rational thought — the side that gets OSHA’s rules and regulations. The part of the brain that governs feelings, emotions, anxiety, and compassion is the limbic brain. The limbic responds to sensations, such as rewards, warmth, or cold. The limbic is personal, reacting at the ‘local’ level. This is why we ask workers to remember their family, recalling how an injury, or worse, leads to a life-changing future for those they love. Go limbic so your messages stick. 

Train workers by speaking the language they understand. Avoid convoluted ideas and inflated words. Go local. Learn the meanings of work words. There are workers who judge trainers by how scarred their hands are, and how confidently they carry themselves, all with the intention of gauging the trainer’s authenticity. Train only what you know. 

Finally, train against the current idea that safety is a personal choice. Instead, remind workers that work teams and their families depend on them. Will you achieve all the successes you want? Will those you serve finally hear you? There might be a full mind and body reckoning, but aim for your workforce, realizing how unsafe they’ve been. It’s possible that you’re the first safety person they hear this message from now that you’ve got them listening.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.