Safety professionals are more than a little preoccupied by the need to drive down injuries across industries, organizations, and communities. We are fiercely driven to protect the people we serve whether that protection extends to fingers, backs, or lives. Truly, our work in safety is an all-career, all-consuming thing-often requiring us to forego time off or time with family.
Because we match the high stakes of safety with an equally high professional commitment, we naturally regard the tools we use as impactful on the people we strive to protect and the organizations that they serve. Training includes one such tool that we revere, and we faithfully select relevant topics and willingly present them to one and all. And, over time, our training lifestyle legitimizes the following training myths:
Regulatory requirements drive not just what we teach but how in order to build safety awareness.
Participants must demonstrate their commitment to changing thinking and behavior by applying what they learned on their own.
A well-attended class equals a successful learning event.
Unfortunately, demonstrating our commitment to fingers, backs, and lives by sharing information and lending subject-matter expertise in the classroom is typically ineffective. While many of us thrive on serving our colleagues through instruction, role play, simulations, and discussion, the impact of our labor is often unseen months, weeks, or even days after the learning event. As Dan Petersen wrote in Safety Management: A Human Approach, "it has not been proven that improvement in skills and attitudes have any effect on job performance" (2001). There is, at best, a dotted line connecting our teaching efforts to results.
Organizations rightfully demand results from training programs, and so must we. However, we must temper organizations' demand for numbers only because that request triggers a decadeslong, conditioned response in us to create well-ordered audit trails that inspectors and lawyers approve of but that focus on stuff more than people. And it's in people where the heart of excellent safety culture truly lies.
Those of us who are responsible for developing or strengthening employees' knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) must assume responsibility for showing what we believe: educational efforts do change minds and behaviors, resulting in fewer injuries, safer employees, and healthier organizations.
The key to demonstrable results does not center around the content of our training sessions, impeccable presentation skills, or well-managed documentation of employee training provided. In fact, the key to demonstrable results does not center around us at all.
In this article, we-Lee Aumend, of Pinsly Railroad Company, and Christina Schulz, of the Hile Group-discuss how we avoided the above-listed myths when we supported leadership development at Pinsly Railroad Company, a short-line railroad and railroad distribution service organization headquartered in Westfield, Massachusetts.
A major shift in leadership of the Pinsly Railroad Company (PRC), matched with a dramatic realignment of business strategy, marked the turning point for safety.
