OHS education and training plays a critical role in compliance and improving safety outcomes, and there are a number of steps OHS professionals can take to improve the safety qualifications, skills and capability of employees, by Craig Donaldson.
Like most other busy professionals, OHS practitioners are under pressure to do more with less. From pace of change and technological developments, through to more regulation and tougher business conditions, increasingly complex day-to-day challenges are making things tough for many OHS professionals. Such factors often make it hard for organizations and their executives to take a proactive approach to OHS and build a culture of safety, let alone meeting minimum commitments for legislated work health and safety requirements.
Time and cost are two of the most obvious challenges facing companies when it comes to OHS training and education, according to Isobel Kidd, learning product manager for SAI Global – “particularly when a business is doing it tough and there isn’t an obvious return on investment to be made from safety training,” she says. “By that logic, businesses with shrinking profits should also drop their insurance policies and sack their accounting staff, since neither of these add income to the company.”
OHS training is a significant component of a viable and sustainable organisation, and Kidd also says the courts, as a result of the “due diligence” components of the OHS Act, are looking more and more intently at how organisations ensure that they know what they ought to know.
Phoebe Lahey, general manager of HBA Learning Centres, observes that all companies face different challenges. “Companies in high risk industries are generally very aware of their obligations under the OHS legislation as they tend to have experienced OHS incidents or investigations and usually have implemented some form of OHS measures in the form of training, whether it be reactive or proactive. The most common issue that these companies face is the time to put their employees though training and education,” she says.
Other challenges companies face with OHS training and education needs, on top of time availability, is budget, lack of knowledge of the severity of the fines and jail time that may be issued as a result of poor OHS. “Therefore, they do not see OHS training and education as a priority, and not being aware of their legal responsibilities, the safety culture of the company/site, management’s attitude to safety and remoteness of a company/site, making it hard to access face-to-face courses or not having reliable internet coverage to complete self-paced work – just to name a few,” she says. “But as I’ve said, each company is different and the challenges and issues they face will differ from company to company, even site to site within the same company.”
Robin Winning, director of Best Practice Managed Solutions, says another challenge facing companies is relentless change and the increase in requirements for evidence-based worker skill comprehension and competency verification. “Most companies fail to develop a post-training action plan to ensure positive integration into everyday work activities of the learned skills of their workforce,” she says.
“They fail to make training continuous. Learning should comprise continuous on-the-job training, and coaching by mentors and managers. Companies that encourage workers to learn what they need, when they need to learn it, and that provide regular feedback, can more easily maintain a workforce with up-to-date skills, ready to adapt as business needs and activities shift.”
Bridging Common Gaps
One of the most common gaps for companies is their knowledge of the difference between what education is and what training is, according to Sue Reed, course coordinator: postgraduate OHS programs at Edith Cowan University. “In general, management do not understand the differences in certificate level outcomes versus university degrees,” she says.
“One strength of university education is that the graduates of these courses are taught more not only how to think outside the box, but also how to validate their experience, findings and recommendations with reference to literature.”
The most common gap with training is understanding the volume of learning that is required by the relevant qualifications framework in many vocational education and training (VET) courses, Reed adds. “This issue has arisen because of the rapid development of many registered training organizations (RTOs) who are registered to run certificates, Diplomas and Advanced Diplomas, whose courses may not meet the volume of learning,” she says.
Winning also notes that many companies do not have a starting point for their workforce when it comes to OHS education or training, and this in itself creates a gap. “Competencies should be identified by way of a training needs analysis: identify the base, identify the skill/knowledge gaps, implement training, close the gap, and manage the outcome,” she says.
“The organisation must nominate the tasks a worker will undertake, make a record of previous training and current qualifications to identify training needs then manage to completion including a verification of competency process.”
Understanding this must start at the top, and Reed says one of the most common gaps is the reluctance of senior management to acknowledge their own training needs, responsibilities and more importantly the inconsistencies between what is, as a minimum, legislatively required and their organization’s ability to meet those requirements.
Lahey says one of the biggest gaps when it comes to OHS training and education and compliance is that every employee does not have OHS training and education. “How can they be aware of their legal obligations if they are not trained in it,” she says.
“I feel that at a bare minimum staff should be trained in the legislation, emergency response, hazard identification and health and wellbeing. Every company and industry is different, varying in risk rating, exposure, employees, etc - however, it is imperative that all employees in every company should be aware of the legislative requirements as well as any training related to the highest rated risks or most common hazards of their workplace. Each business should have at least at minimum one person with a OHS certificate in work health safety, and if they are higher risk and are developing systems, conducting audits and investigations they should definitely at least have a diploma trained person.”
Investing in Higher Level Safety
With increasing financial pressures on organisations, companies are also looking for an increased return on their “safety dollar”, according to Steve Young, program coordinator for the Graduate Diploma in Occupational Hazard Management at the Victorian Institute of Occupational Safety at Federation University.
“Costs seem to be rising, yet measures of safety improvement appear to be decelerating. It is the responsibility of OHS educators to focus students’ attention on the most efficient and productive means of increasing workplace safety,” he says.
“Safety managers usually understand the relative effectiveness of applying the hierarchy of controls to any hazardous situation; yet they generally fail to introduce higher level controls into the workplace – either through lethargy by doing what has always been done (and expecting a different result: the definition of madness), or through their inability to influence stakeholders.”
Most safety resources are “invested” in lower order controls, such as rules, signs, and staff training, and while these may be important components in a range of injury prevention measures, Young says corporate managers and safety professionals have been too quick to hide behind the “as far as practicable” clause in statute books and regulations.
“If we keep investing in lower order controls their relative lack of effectiveness will continue to deliver disappointing results,” he says. “Unfortunately, most safety training, signs, rules, procedures and so on amount to no more than a ‘kind wish’. Safety positions are often advertised and filled with people who appear or claim to have the ability to motivate staff to work ever more carefully.
“Of course, employees have a duty of care to work in a safe manner, but it is extremely difficult to ‘be careful’ when an explosion is heading towards them at 10,000 km/h, or a crane-load is falling towards them from a great height.”
The answer to the “quick fix” is to invest in higher levels of safety control: to spend funds on measures such as hazard elimination or isolation (or substitution or engineering in some companies’ hierarchies of control), says Young. “But how does a safety professional convince a board or their accountant to apply precious funds to sometimes substantial safety interventions? This is never easy, but a highly trained safety professional should be able to demonstrate the increased effectiveness of higher order controls over lower and often ineffective or temporary measures. Eliminating or effectively isolating a hazard will always provide a higher return on investment over time when compared to the quick fix.”
A safety professional with a graduate-level qualification should be able to convince his/her stakeholders of the effectiveness of appropriate application of the hierarchy of controls, he says. “They should also be able to convince the employees of their organisation of the same thing. After all, the employees are usually the experts in their jobs – they generally know how their workplaces can be changed to make them safer – but their knowledge is often discounted or ignored. Safety professionals must be the catalyst whereby employees’ knowledge and stakeholders’ investment are reconciled. Effective safety intervention requires a graduate-level safety professional who understands this process.”