Practice Makes Perfect: Safety Training for the Workplace

Aug. 24, 2011 - PRLog -- The idea of repetition is nothing new. Seemingly innocent unsafe habits can have dire consequences, as these are typically the little things that can make all the difference. After all, safety isn’t one big safe act completed once a day; it is the overall result of making hundreds of often insignificant decisions, repeatedly, both consciously and unconsciously, to do the right thing the right way.

This is where Adapto's (http://www.adapto.co.nz/) new safety training programme comes in. This programme, divided into three parts, relies on a “practice makes perfect” concept in developing sustainable safe habits; you use repetition to improve safety in the workplace. The first part of this programme evaluates the physical environment in which you work. By improving the environment, you are reducing the likelihood of accidents.

Next the programme (http://www.adapto.co.nz/products.htm) directs you to make sure your rules – the policies, procedures and standards in the organisation – are free of bad safety ideas. No use pursuing safety if the standard operating procedures you teach the staff are riddled with unsafe instructions or too complex for the average person to understand.

The final part works on safety behaviours. Taking the time and effort to do that extra step will with time and repetition become a natural step in the process, requiring little to no extra thought. Granted, little reminders may be necessary at first. For example, each time you get in your car, a beeping sound reminds you to ‘buckle up’. The more you wear your safety belt, the more you get used to putting it on until it eventually becomes an automatic, good, and safe habit.

This is not treating people as if they are Pavlov’s dogs – what is known as ‘classical conditioning’ or ‘behaviour modelling’. The safety programme is not relying on either reward or punishment as if the staff were dogs. The programme uses much more sophisticated methods to assist you to change your habits, but in a way that makes the change process simple and easy.

What is important is that, when the programme is implemented, people do things right because the environment is conducive to doing it right, the standard procedures make sense to them and they have created safe habits. Safety becomes the ‘way we do things around here’, not something that is either drilled or punished into people. We do it right because that’s what we do around here.

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Adapto offers a refreshingly new way of managing health and safety. Rather than slavishly following the prescriptions of bureaucrats, focusing on compliance – which invariably means rather unproductive paperwork - we actually help you to make safety work towards YOUR goals.

Visit our website: http://www.adapto.co.nz/