Going Beyond ‘Good Enough’: OSHA Safety Training Requirements and Recommendations

While following the recommendations might be viewed as “reasonable steps” to prevent or reduce hazards—which employers are obligated to do under federal law—failing to do so isn’t, on its own, a violation of that law, OSHA explains.

In effective training, the agency says, participants should learn:

• How to identify safety and health problems in their workplaces
• How to analyze the causes of those safety and health problems
• How to make workplaces safer and healthier
• How to get co-worker support in accomplishing each of those tasks

A general review of safety education programs shows that the best ones have four traits in common, OSHA says. They are:

• Accurate: Materials are prepared by qualified personnel and updated as needed.
• Credible: Instructors and facilitators have a background in safety and health or related subject-matter expertise as well as experience in the presentation of training programs.
• Clear: Programs should be understandable to participants. If they rely on jargon unfamiliar to recipients, then they don’t meet workers’ needs.
• Practical: The information and skills should be directly useful in participants’ working lives. Learning occurs more easily when participants quickly see how they can use the information in their jobs.

Since most workplace safety training participants are adults, the agency adds, gearing methods toward their unique learning styles will make programs more effective.

Points to keep in mind include the following, OSHA says:

• Adults are voluntary learners. Most of them learn because they’ve decided they need to master a new topic for a specific reason.
• Adults pick up needed information quickly. The catch is that they usually have to understand why the information is important to them.
• Adults typically have a considerable amount of life experience that instructors should acknowledge and even encourage them to share.
• Adults need to be treated with respect. They’re likely to resent an instructor who talks down to them or ignores their ideas.
• Adults learn best by doing. They will retain information more easily when they try out what they’ve learned in class.
• Adults need to know where they’re heading. Instructors can address that requirement by providing “route maps” with clear objectives, logically building each new piece of information on to the previous lesson.
• Adults learn best when new information is repeated, reinforced and presented in different ways.

Regulatory Compliance Is Only the Beginning

Safety experts point out that the benefits of going beyond basic requirements to adopt recommendations and best practices extend far beyond training initiatives to include personal protective equipment, machine guards, hazard barriers and more.

MSC’s industrial safety consultants, for instance, rely on the general duty clause of the law creating OSHA and broadly applicable regulations as starting points, not end goals, when conducting workplace safety assessments.

 “We’re looking at risk overall, so even if something is in compliance—following the letter of what OSHA says—if there’s still a good chance that someone could get hurt as a result, we’ll note it and make a recommendation on how to make it safer,” says team manager Jeffrey Merkel.

While the companies with the best track records in workplace safety use straightforward tactics like habit-reinforcing incentives to prompt employee compliance, global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. says, they also tend to emphasize softer practices “such as encouraging employees to ‘own’ safety problems and to take leadership in the search for solutions,” the firm says.

“Engaging employees in the identification of problems and involving them in the design of solutions raises the organization’s awareness, lowers its tolerance for risk and improves the chances of actually adopting a solution,” McKinsey says.

How has safety training that emphasized best practices above and beyond regulatory compliance benefited you? Tell us in the comments below.