How much safety training is too much?

Safety training is just like any other training. Too little, and your employees won’t know what to do. Too much, and they’ll start to tune out. The key to knowing just how much safety training you need to provide is data, but drowning in data causes its own problems. Here a few tips for effectively measuring your safety training results.

Define Your Safety Training Goals

Identify each issue you want to address, and then set a reasonable goal for improvement. For example, you might want to reduce noncompliance with hard hat wearing by 25%.

Figure Out the Key Performance Indicators

In the above example, your KPI might be the number of hard hat infractions you see when walking the floor.

Choose the Right Measurement Tools

It’s easy enough to simply count hard hat infractions on one trip through one warehouse. But one day of data doesn’t tell you much. How will you keep a running tally over a month or six months? Do you also want to count infractions that your managers notice when you’re not on the floor? Are there multiple warehouses with different supervisors? To keep an accurate, real-time count, you may want to turn to technology. Consider using a digital system that lets everyone on your supervisory team enter data on the fly.

Determine the Proper Metrics

Something like hard hat wearing is binary. Either an employee is wearing a hard hat or not. But what about more complex safety training concerns, such as proper forklift operation? Jobs can be hazardous for many different reasons, and preventing accidents through training could mean paying attention to several different metrics at once. Remember to maintain a narrow focus on safety, as it’s easy to spiral into measuring all sorts of different data that has no real impact on your basic goal.

Safety training can be complicated, and sometimes it’s hard to know exactly how much training to provide. But if you focus on your goals, determine the right KPIs and metrics, and select the proper measurement tools, you’ll be on your way to creating a safer workplace.

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