How You Can Energize Safety Training at Your Company

by Kim Caserta, Consulting Safety Officer, Safety Partners, Inc. and
Denise Aronson, President, Safety Partners, Inc.

Does your staff moan and groan over the prospect of sitting through your firm's annual safety training. Safety Partners recently attended a course about how to energize safety presentations and are applying what we learned to our training programs. Perhaps you can benefit from the tips we learned.

How to Optimize Information Retention

During the course, we learned about adult learning and retention. Some adults are passive learners and learn best by watching others. Others are active learners who learn best through active participation and benefit from hands-on activities. Some adults need visuals while others need to listen.

We also discussed training techniques that are based on U.S. educationalist Edgar Dale's Cone of Learning and his work in the field of instructional media. According to Dale, learning and retention improves as learning becomes more active. For example, retention is lowest (10 to 30%) for information received by reading, hearing words, and looking at pictures. But, retention is highest (90%) when students can apply what is learned in the real world and or through a simulation – learning by doing, active learning.

We Apply What We Learned

Armed with new information about adult learning, we applied it to a client's annual training. This annual training session covered emergency response, chemical safety, biosafety, and OSHA's Bloodborne Pathogens Standard. There was a lot of information to present to a large audience. So, it was critical that we apply what we learned about active learning and the different types of learners.

The backbone of the training was a PowerPoint® presentation where we discussed the contents of each slide. Based on the Edgar Dale Cone of Learning, we knew that students would retain about 50% of what we presented because two senses are involved – hearing and sight. This was a start, but not good enough. So, we added other training techniques.

Students participated in two breakout sessions. They split into small groups to brainstorm about how to respond to a needle-stick injury. Each small group was facilitated by a member of the firm's safety committee who helped the group walk through how to respond to a needle stick. Since each group was "doing" by "responding" to the needle stick, we believe that participants will retain 90% of what they learned.

In another breakout session the attendees were split into two larger groups that discussed how to respond to spills. In this breakout session, the attendees had to write their responses. Because of this breakout session, retention should increase from 50% for "seeing and hearing" a PowerPoint ® presentation to 70% from participating in a discussion about the topic and writing down responses to questions about how they would respond at their work site.

You may recall from Safety Partners' last The Catalyst newsletter article that we recently produced a video about eyewash stations. The people who starred in the video as coworkers responding to a splash accident will surely retain 90% of what they learned.

What are some ways that you can increase information retention from your training sessions? Add more visuals – pictures and a video. Hands-on demonstrations, role playing, and problem-solving discussions are other ways.

Safety Partners always seek feedback after our training sessions. One of the comments we received from the training session we discussed here was, "Attending annual safety training is always like getting a needle in your eye, but this session wasn't so bad. It was like getting a local anesthetic first!" Based on that comment, we'd say that the techniques we employed were a success. Of course, we'll continually look for ways to apply other techniques for energizing training.

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Safety Partners efficiently and cost-effectively implements hands-on environmental, health, and safety (EHS) programs at emerging life sciences companies. Safety Partners tailors its programs to each client's unique science, processes, procedures, and facilities, while reducing program implementation burdens. Its expertise is unmatched, clocking over 85,000 hours at over 120 New England life sciences firms.