Safety Training Prog (Part2/2) by Barbara Semeniuk

Something to share (http://www.safetyxchange.org/training-and-leadership/how-to-create-effective-training-sessions-part-2-of-2)

How to Create Effective Training Sessions, Part 2 of 2

November 17, 2009

Barbara Semeniuk

The first step in creating safety training sessions is to assess the existing gaps in your training program. In Part 1 last week, we looked at how to conduct a gap analysis. Let's turn now to how to use the findings of your gap analysis to craft training sessions that deliver your safety message effectively.

Customize Training to Suit Trainees' Needs

Safety training sessions must be reality-based. In other words, they must deal with the real challenges participants actually face on the job. Training should be customized to the needs and requirements of the participants and delivered in a way that allows for participation and interaction.

Before the Sessions

Effective training classes have to be directed and, before the training session develops, upfront work must be done by all parties. Participants should meet with their boss one-on-one before the training so that everyone is fully aware of potential barriers to success and gets involved in devising strategies to surmount the barriers. The goal of this process is to:

1. Identify Skill Levels: There shouldn't be a huge range of skill levels in the class. Students have to be selected so that their skill levels are appropriate for the training material or learning will not be effective. If you have an engineer at one end of the class and someone functionally illiterate at the other end, you will lose one or the other and neither will be comfortable in such an environment.

2. Set Expectations: Management, or the student's boss, should set expectations for the class and demonstrate their commitment to the process by meeting with each student prior to the learning experience and setting goals and expectations based on the course content. During this meeting, the student should be informed that he will be graded on a performance evaluation after the training class to determine if the skills have transferred. Remember: What gets measured gets done.

During the Sessions

It's important that the trainer engage the learners in a safe, fun, informative session with good adult learning techniques applied.

1. Encourage Coaching: The tell/show/do/teach cycle of learning is very powerful and participants should actively coach other members of the class. You can turn this into a fun and informative process by tossing balls to participants in groups to select the next group to lead the class in what they have discovered. Everybody participates in a fun, comfortable and safe environment.

2. Encourage Networking: Participants should network amongst themselves. It is possible that trainees may develop lasting friendships with people they meet in the class.

3. Look Forward: Once the learning session wraps up, rather than focusing on what the group now knows, instead focus on what the group needs to do from this point on. During the class session, build "to do" lists identifying what participants need to do to ensure that knowledge gained during the training sessions is not lost.

After the Sessions

After the training session:

1. Discuss Implementation of Key Concepts: There should be a debriefing by the boss. No happy sheets grading the niceness of the trainer's delivery or how happy the participants were in class. Instead, you want to discuss which key concepts from the training session will be applied immediately, within 30 days, within six months, within a year.

2. Train the Supervisor: The person's immediate supervisor can play an important role in the transfer of knowledge and should be held accountable for his/her staff. Special training sessions just for supervisors to facilitate this process may be in order as well.

3. Follow-up: Using the "to do" lists created at the end of the training session, have the management team evaluate how well these lists are executed by conducting performance reviews at clearly defined intervals. Also, ensure that performance appraisals are conducted at the intervals discussed during the debriefing.

4. Provide Refreshers: To help participants maintain their new knowledge, periodically offer quizzes, reviews or group sessions when new machines or tasks are introduced.

Conclusion

A well-designed course is a joy to teach. The session becomes an experience in which the trainer facilitates learning and the participants learn by doing. But to create effective training sessions you need to prepare: conduct a gap analysis, set clear performance expectations and help participants maintain their new knowledge during the course of their day-to-day activities. In this manner, information from the class will be disseminated, skills will be learned and barriers to success overcome!

Safety Training Prog (Part1/2) by Barbara Semeniuk

Something to share (http://www.safetyxchange.org/training-and-leadership/using-gap-analysis-to-improve-your-program-part-1-of-2)

How to Improve Your Safety Training Program, Part 1 of 2

November 4, 2009

Barbara Semeniuk

Is your safety training simply an information dump? You're not alone. Many trainers feel that the more information they present, the better the session will be. Others simply let regulations determine what they teach because these classes are an easy sell. And these same trainers hope for happy participants in a well-attended class who rate the instructor as good to excellent. They also expect these participants to demonstrate their commitment to this new knowledge by applying it on their own time under their own steam.

The reality is that to facilitate the effective transfer of knowledge from the instructor to the class, instructors need a well-designed course, using simplicity and variety. It's a process that requires a bit of planning.

Conduct a Gap Analysis Before Training Begins

The instructor and the students both participate in the learning process and they learn in the most realistic and systematic fashion. To ensure that this occurs, it's helpful to first conduct a gap analysis. Why? A gap analysis may determine that:

• Middle management is uncertain of their roles and responsibilities in a Health and Safety management system;
• Location management may not have built a strong relationship with the trainer to allow for shared safety expectations and goal-setting. Decisions are not done in a collaborative fashion;
• Workers are frustrated with the perceived level of resources allocated towards Health and Safety;
• Workers are frustrated because some of the rules don't make sense at their location or work environment.

How to Identify Gaps

Look at your safety training program and ask yourself the questions below. (Note: These questions are performance factors adapted from Rummler and Brache's research on performance factors by the Hile group.) If the answer to any of these questions is "No" or "Don't know" there is a gap in performance.

1. Does the safety program have the necessary corporate support in place? Does everyone have what they need to do what they are supposed to do?
2. Training sessions need to set clear performance expectations. Do your trainees know what they are supposed to be able to do after training and can they do it?
3. Are trainees measured on their performance and are there consequences for good and/or bad performance?

When performance gaps occur, you have a failure in the management system and a barrier to transfer of knowledge. You also have an opportunity for improvement

Conclusion

Management, trainers and participants need to be honest about any barriers to safety training and devise methods to surmount them. Next week, we'll look at some ways to achieve that.

How to become a good SHO (Part 2)

When I'm thinking on how to become a good SHO, it's not easy to quantify a "good" SHO... I'm trying my best to become a good SHO.... unfortunately I'm still searching for it...

BUT, after working more than 10 years in manufacturing & construction industries, I believe below are some of the criteria to become a good SHO..
1. Assisting & advising your management to comply with the OSH Laws
- Here, as a competent SHO, you trying your best to deliver all the OSH legal requirements that need to be complied by your organization...

2. Enforce OSH Compliance in your organization
- Walk the talk, pre-define all the OSH requirements upfront, standardization & enforce it....

3. Continual improvement of OSH in your organization
- never ended job to ensure the OSH risks are as low as possible

4. Educate employees on OSH as a value
- this is an essential step to ensure that "the safety of you is in your hand NOT in SHO"
- "Safety.... to valuable to compromise"

How to become a good SHO

SHO is interesting occupation that can challenge our capacity & capability in managing OSH at workplace... involved multidisciplinary including technical knowledge such as engineering, chemical, health, management etc making SHO as a challenging job...

so, how to become a good SHO? I received a good comment from OSH colleague in NRG-MASHO network... below is the excerpt from his email..

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Dinesh Kumar wrote:
Dear All,

I had received a lot of CV’s; thanks and I’ll be contacting you guys if there is any available position arises. Apologize; I can’t reply your mails personally; it’s too many to reply.

I would like to share some information and let us think: How to be a successful SHO? For many people or legally, it means that you need to study the SHO course, pass the NIOSH examination, get the required experience and register with DOSH. You’ll be walking to fame earning a very high salary. Right? It’s wrong actually….

The above requirement is the basic entry passport to be a competent SHO. Of course it will improve from your present life situation but it won’t guarantee you to be a successful SHO. You need to be very much more competent than that.

I think what going to make a difference whether you are going to be successful safety manager, safety engineer, SHO or even a safety supervisor are:

Your public relation skills: You must be able to communicate efficiently, speak good language and always look presentable. Safety is often described as non profitable department. Always there will be situation where we need to convince our boss to implement or purchase some things. If your PR is not good, your boss won’t buy your idea. Really. Everybody will have the confidence when dealing with a guy whom has a good PR. When you are in a meeting, speak confidently, don’t talk nonsense and ensure that everybody understands what you are trying to convey. You must be able to speak your mind in front of people.
Its IT world out there. Computer applications must be at your finger tips, you must be able to do good reports, make presentation slides and write commanding emails all the time. A work memo is not like sending text messages; most people still lack this basic skills (I noticed a lot of mails sent to the group are really sub standard). You can use this group as your learning platform on this matter.
Leadership skills. Safety line requires a lot of it. If you can’t show that you can lead your workers, then you are in no business doing safety.
Education. It’s been a trend these days that many people start taking safety courses right after they finish their SPM. I can’t see the logic: A full time SHO course is not even a month and a full time engineering degree is at least 3 years. Can we expect to be paid the same after we graduate? The thing here is you must have a tertiary education; a recognized diploma or degree in certain field and do the safety course as a major study later on. Now days there are even a lot of degree or master program in safety as well.
Knowledge. I mean real working situation knowledge. A lot of people out there will try to bullshit to us and find their way out; so don’t be fooled by them. Hit right to their face with your knowledge. Power will come with great knowledge. I’ve seen many cases here where the SHO will be pushed to do jobs that actually not related to him; just because it’s in context with safety. Good knowledge will let you judge how you suppose to handle this kind of situation.
Be practical. I’ve seen normally SHO’s are more concern on the legal matters. They will be so worried if their place didn’t comply with certain issues. For example there is a case recently where someone’ fire extinguishers doesn’t have the bomba cert and he has been so worried about it. What’s the scare here actually? As long as the FE can be used, explain to bomba the company situation and promise them that you’ll renew the cert as soon as possible. That’s all. The bomba or DOSH not going to penalize you, instead they’ll give you much more suggestions to improve your work place.
Goals. Set your goals. What do you plan to achieve in your career?


This mail did not intend to criticize anyone here; I’m just doing my part to the community and share my knowledge.These is all based on my personal experience and maybe some of you guys won’t agree with me as well. There are a lot of successful and knowledgeable guys in this group that I had come across. Maybe they can share their knowledge as well.

SHO-3: Where I should begin?

Why I choose Safety? To tell the truth,
a. I like to mingle with people... don't know why, maybe I inherited it from my parent :).
b. Furthermore, I like to share.... something like, you advise people... teach or educate people about the knowledge that you know... sharing your knowledge & experience and
c. I think, I want to work where hopefully it will become a good deed (pahala) for me.... since this world is just a temporary world & akhirat is a permanent world....

SO, if you have same passion with me as above, I believe SHO is the job that you can consider as a career. Maybe, some people think that money $$ is people's motivator to choose a career BUT for me that's not a career... it merely a "job"

SHO-2: Where I should begin?

Continue frm my previous blog... telling you the truth, I never knew that there is a post on Safety & Health at my 1st company that I worked... after 2 years working as Process & Equipment engineer, I think this is not the job that I want... my heart is empty at that time. I just trying to convince myself, just gain knowledge & skills as much as possible when you young. I have a good team at that time.

My first "real/formal exposure" involvement in OSH when I was selected by my boss as Safety & Health Committee (SHC) member. I just wondering at that time, why me (daaaa... maybe other people is busy & I'm the only one was free or it's another boring "jobscope" for other people..heheheh)?? I just take it without thinking a lot & hopefully my boss will see my commitment to take "additional task".... then I have good reason to promote or increase my salary (in my dream at that time, & of course not sincere enough to take additional task :).

After I joined SHC, then I can see the real "macro view" of OSH management. It really open my mind & heart when OSH talking about employee's safety, company's commitment & image, customer requirements, legal requirements, training, enforcement, ERP... wooowww, & interesting part (pssstt... you have a direct meeting with CEO!!)... nobody have that opportunity right!!.... this was my 1st stepping stone involved in OSH and it really make me to think thoroughly on my future career... this happen in year 2000...

Safety & Health Officer (SHO) - 1: Where I should begin?

The main idea why I introduce this topic is because I want to share when, where, why, whom, what, how, who... I start or become SHO. I read few comments/questions in the NIOSH Forum & also in SHO mailing list on the difficulty of some new comers to involved in OSH discipline... There will be few parts in this topic & feel free to discuss this matter openly & interllectually so that this blog can bring benefits to OSH practisioners...

Let me start on "why I want to become SHO"? Fyi, I start my career as Process & Equipment Engineer. When I joined a semiconductor industry as my 1st job after I completed my study in Mechanical Engineering 11 yrs ago, I just follow my heart. At that time, I just want to work because I need to earn money.... Don't want to burden my parent of course... At the same time, I'm still not sure what's my career path... at the same time, trying to understand some Safety Standards (more on SEMI & FM standards) when preparing the equipment specs.. furthermore, I'm incharged on the equipment that used lot hazardous chemicals e.g. Acids, Caustics & Solvents!!.... that was the first time I exposed on Safety!!