Episode 129 - Training the Team

This week, we chat about the importance of safety training and the ripple effects when training is unavailable.

Resource Links
https://jordanbarab.com/confinedspace/2023/09/25/weekly-toll-say-their-names/

Transcript

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Announcer: 0:15

Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now, here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:04

And welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hello, I am your host, Dr. Mark French. And as always, I am so excited that you chosen to join me for my podcast and be part of it. So thank you for that. So as I do frequently, I think about the podcast that I recorded before. And of course, I come across more news this week that continued that whole thought process for me in so I want to clarify a little bit last week, we talked again, I've been listening for any time, I have a great passion for safety training, especially new hire safety training, because we don't know where people come from. We don't know what kind of background they have with that. And, you know, common sense comes from your perspective. And I've said, I love that idea behind it. That common sense is all about your perspective, it's what you grew up with, it's what you learned, it's what you've been doing with your life, that creates your version of common sense. Just like living in a big city blows my mind, I don't know that I could do it without a lot of practice, because I don't have that experience. Same way that living on out in the very rural part of anywhere would be very daunting for someone who hadn't done that before. There's different challenges there. In my focus on safety training, and even what I'm gonna take this even further and say good safety practices, an organization that cares an organization that tries it, I'm going to push even further and even say human resources, so any people processes, human resources, safety. If you haven't seen what a good system looks like, you'll never know it. And when you're working somewhere in I've seen this happen in other industries, when we people move from one job to another is that if they've worked only for one place, and they've only seen it one way, and it wasn't catastrophic. So you know, we did our job, we got paid, we came home. Yeah, there were some things I didn't like. But at the end of the day, it was what someone would consider average, they might come to another organization and go, Why are you doing all these people things? Why are you doing all these safety things? Even if we're just baselining legality, because they don't have the baseline of seeing it the right way. And there is where safety training and people training to me is so important. Because we have to reset that baseline. Every time we have people come into our organization, every time we see new people, we have to think about their background, maybe they've been to a place that actually has exceptional people and safety processes. You know what opportunity to learn. Like, if they have a better idea, please, let's share, share those ideas. But unfortunately, what my history has shown is in my experience is that you'll get people who saw a program that was less than what OSHA would say they never got caught. They never had issues. They were lucky. They were just a lucky environment. And then they'll come into the workforce. And they'll start to make those changes because they're easier. Or they feel like they're easier. They feel like they're more comfortable. So because they didn't see a good safety or people program. They don't know anything. That's their common sense. That's their baseline. And that's not bad. That's not the fault of the organizations that didn't do the right thing and teaching them and I've had a lot of conversations I wouldn't say arguments but conversations with people over the years about you know, actually what you're doing is not Right, I know you've been doing it for years you're used to it. But if we can improve it, and let me help you improve it in you show me how we can meet both. It's not it's not the, the question of, we have to do this, but we're going to lose something. It's we're going to do this. And it's that idea that there's plenty for everyone that we can do this. And we can do it safely. And we can do it legally. And we can. There's nothing stopping us other than good collaboration, teamwork, and a little bit of thought process that goes behind it. And you know what, here's the sticky wicket, sometimes some investment, whether it be time or money, it takes that to get it done. And it's the right thing to do. And it should be the thing we do. And there's where my fundamental is what I was trying to figure out between the last podcast and this one is Why do I keep getting hung up on training one, we see that as a, as a path to fatalities have not training people the right way. It's one of those paths. It's multivariate. It is not, there's no silver bullet that's gonna prevent it. There's a lot of things that go wrong. It's one of those paths. It's one of my passions, because I love training. I love teaching people about safety. It's one of the things I enjoy doing, I enjoy creating the material. I just love training. And evidently, I love talking because here we are, on my podcast. I enjoy it. So it's one of my passions. And but why am I just like always fired up, when I see a news story that kind of hints at the lack of training, I think that's where it is, is that not only have they set that person up, to not know the right way of doing it, they maybe even are perpetuating it into other organizations. Because let's say you go from one small one organization to another organization that also doesn't have a lot of practices. And they look to this other person. So you're now an expert, because you've got years of experience in this other location, you bring those same practices, the new location, and with that, we start to continually teach the wrong way. And eventually it gets to the point where there is significant risk, and we can't always out run the risk of eventually, it comes up. It's kind of like the roulette wheel. Eventually, the number hits and something bad happens. And then we look back and go Well, that's just the way we've always been has been taught for years. And it may have come from a whole nother organization that was teaching it that way too. And confined spaces to me is one of those. There's always a lot of Miss miscommunication about confined spaces, rescue systems. Lockout Tagout is one hot work is another like what constitute hot work, what constitutes debris? I see a lot of that. And sometimes it's hard to break that idea. And I'm not always to be honest, I sometimes don't have I come in a little bit hot. Sometimes I come in with passion. And I don't mean it mean, I really have to tone myself down instead of me going, Hey, that's wrong. After my, hey, I'm noticing this. We're can can we fix it? Like, I noticed, I really would really hate to see something catch on fire. I'd hate to see this happen. I'm not letting it happen. I'm not going to be that, of course. But there has to be a people approach to it. Because I can't go in assuming they're doing it wrong for the sake of doing it wrong. That's like a miniscule percent percent of the population actually makes that active choice to do it wrong, because it's wrong. Because there's no benefit to that. Most of the time, it's lack of time, lack of resources, lack of knowledge. And if you don't know, how can you fix it? If you've always known it just one way, if you've only seen it just one way, how do you know it's different? I think of that when I think about how you pronunciate languages, like there's so many words out there. And depending on where you are in the country, you're gonna say it a different way. And someone else in a different part of the country is gonna go, what? And it's not wrong. It's just the way you've always done it. And we have to sometimes change that in the world of safety and HR, because it may be something that creates risk, or it creates a policy that isn't in favor of our people. Once we as supervisors as leaders, we have to approach that situation with an open mind and thinking, well, this is their reality. How am I able to get involved enough to help them shift their idea and help them evolve, help them adapt to a new reality that actually is an improvement for them, and everyone around them? That's our ultimate goal is how do we make it better? And how do we motivate our people? How do we empower our people? How do we create the message that is engaging? How do we create the message that creates meaning for our team. And I think that's ultimately what I want to search for and what I truly strive for when I think about safety training, and it really upsets me, and it fires me up when I hear about other organizations that just let it ride and it ends up hurting someone killing someone, and just creating, creating a situation that should never happen. More Podcast coming up. In just a moment, you are

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listening to the leading a learning through safety podcast, with Dr. Mark French,

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D is D consulting, learn you lead others, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. The problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr. Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more. Individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at TS da consulting.com. And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So I spent a lot of time talking in this first half. And I didn't really get to the news stories I want to talk about. And so I'm gonna get to that now because it's going to solidify more of what I was just talking about with safety training. So this one actually comes from, if you're not subscribed to this

Mark French: 11:44

blog I would really recommend is by Jordan bhairab. It's the weekly toll it's actually called the confined space is the name of his blog. It's Jordan bhairab.com. I'll post a link. Every week, he posts almost like clockwork list of every occupational fatality he can find. And he wrote, it's to remember that we still have a long ways to go in the safety world. And the top three stories and the line that he put on here is 318 year olds, dead in a week, 318 year olds. I mean, I'm, I'm middle I'm right at my midpoint in my life. And I think man I got a lot more to live for. I got a lot more to do, I think back to when I was 18. And I think about all the potential that's there. And because of work things, because of going to work to earn a living 318 year olds didn't come back home. That's sobering when you see it like that. So the first one, actually. So the first one was a tree service, this 18 year old was working for a tree service, logging as a very, very injurious, very hazardous working environment requires, surprisingly, a lot of training. It's not just chopping down a tree, or now sawing down a tree. There's work that has to go into it, but blunt force trauma to the upper body. The second one, another tree injury, electrocuted while cutting down a tree, so too close to the power lines that hit the power line, residential dropside transported to hospital later pronounced dead 18 years old. The last one is a construction equipment crash. So an 18 year old and a single car crash. He was an employee, he was driving a roller piece of construction equipment. He was traveling down a steep hill hit an even spot lost control and was rejected. Wow. Why? So when we think about young people entering the workforce, and I think about what kind of training they need. Those are some industries. And those are some work practices that they need. Because, really, when and I'm going to be perfectly honest here if I was to think about the idea of, hey, I need you to chop down I need you get up there get these limbs off that tree so we can we can bring it down. Would I think in my mind that I would need to explain to someone that you don't want to hit the power lines. Would I make a grand assumption? Could I I'm gonna hope they would I could I make a grand assumption that they would know not to get tangled up in the power lines. That's a reasonable thing. But here's the proof. That doesn't mean we add that doesn't give us the right not to train It doesn't give us the right not to be redundant. We almost have to mean, I was reading. This is kind of folksy, but it's pseudo science, I guess about how many times like an advertising, there's this thing out there you can find. And it talks about how many times you had to advertise something before someone remembers your brand. And it was like seven times the first time, it's like, man, second time, they start to gain interest. By the seventh time they remember it, if they've seen your brand, seven times, we train once, when it comes to annual safety training, in some cases, we hope. And the expectation is with a job safety analysis, that it's a living document that when you walk up on site, there's someone who pulls out that JSA and goes, here's the hazards in our area, here's what we're going to do to mitigate them, we're going to clear the area of the branches that are gonna fall, we don't want anyone underneath them. See those power lines, we don't want to get anywhere close to them, we want to stay plenty of feet away, we don't want to be near them, don't get near them. And if we have to, we'll do we'll we'll do something different. Don't get close to them. Or, and okay, when we drop the tree, we want to pull it, we want to do it here, then we're going to chop it up, we're going to wear a PPE, we got a hearing protection or I protect, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I can go on for days about that. That's the process that should be the process. So yes, I understand that when you think about when you say the word common sense, even though I don't common sense is relative. Maybe not. I mean, this is where if you haven't been around power lines, and someone has explained to you how that works for the first time ever. Like electricity, to me is scary. It always has been because you can't see it. It goes fast. And it can do some crazy things. So personally, as a safety professional, like TriCity, like electricians have some of my highest respect, because even when I try to try to wrap my mind or my mind sometimes even doesn't wrap around the idea of how electricity works and capacitors and amps and volts and etc, etc. It's daunting. But there still should be training on the basics of understanding whether or not you understand all what's going on there. The safety process stays the same. We don't get near it. Did someone say that? I wonder? Did someone train the young person on that piece of equipment that they were going to be driving down on uneven Hill? I don't know. Those are questions that are going to be answered with the investigation, if we even get to see that as part of whatever reporting happens. But that is the critical path. And this is my passion. My whole idea behind wanting better education, wanting organizations to invest time in making sure that we educate the right way we protect the right way we create those protections. I think education is one one piece of it, of course. But I think it's a vital piece because it gives you the first opportunity for two way communication. It gives you the first opportunity to look some talk to someone in a two way opportunity and get feedback on Hey, what do you think so far, or as you get started in your job, come talk to me about this. I think it's a great opportunity for conversation for engagement. And that's why I like training. I think it really gives us those opportunities. Once again, thank you for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Until next time we chat stay safe.

Announcer: 19:02

Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot T S D A consulting.com. All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast