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dition, nor are they intended to be used as legal evidence for workplace/merchandise safety. However, the inexpensive cost, ease of use, and portability of smart phone apps can provide Millennials with an approxi- mate value of noise levels to motivate them to use hearing protection devices.
Five Noise/Sound Meter Apps
In the chart at left are five of the more pro- fessional rated apps in the marketplace. Remember, smart phone apps are not as accurate as a professional SPL noise meter, which can cost in the thousands of dollars. However, when used properly, these apps can provide a good approximate value of noise levels in your environment. Which do you think has more power to motivate a Millennial? A “Hearing Protection Must Be Worn in This Area” sign or when a worker activates his or her sound meter app and sees “100 dB SPL”?
In 2014, NIOSH conducted a pilot study to determine which smart phone apps were the most reliable. The resulting paper, “Eval- uation of Smartphone Sound Measurement Applications,” was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. For more in-depth scientific information about the most reliable smart phone sound-level meter apps, visit http://asa.scitation.org/ doi/full/10.1121/1.4865269.
Empower Millennials to Protect Their Hearing
How can a safety professional encourage Millennials to better protect their hearing both in their professional and personal lives? One key way is to develop digital safety training that caters to the genera- tion that grew up with a cell phone in their purse or pocket.
1. Throw away that black training binder and go digital. Offer safety training on the go by including mobile-enabled training in your safety courses. This gives Millen- nials the flexibility to train any time and anywhere and to engage in training when it best fits into their workflow.
2. Include lots of safety training videos in your modules. Millennials prefer video to PowerPoint decks as they often prefer watching video to reading. The popularity of YouTube among Millennials is a testa- ment to video-based training modules. Instead of showing a diagram on how to in- sert the ear plug, show a video that focuses
on proper insertion techniques.
3. Position your classroom instruction as
a “Coaching Class.”
4. Break up content into bite-size, easy-
to-read pieces with lots of headlines.
5. Use social media to enhance training. Possible social media training exercise for hearing protection: Have your employees download one of the apps. You may want your employees to download different apps to compare differences. Like a treasure hunt, give your employees three or five key noise areas to measure the Sound Pressure Level (SPL) with their apps. On a dedicated Facebook page for the training exercise, ask them to post the sound pressure level in decibels that correlates to the different
noise areas being measured.
Then review the results of the exercise
in a group setting. Make sure you have dif- ferent kinds of hearing protection available with a range of NRRs. Discuss the type of HPD needed or not needed for the differ- ent noise areas. This exercise makes learn- ing more engaging and memorable and helps increase awareness of “hearing loss
danger zones” at your workplace.
6. Ask Millennials for their input about
the hearing protection devices for your safety program. Make it fun. Ask them to take a “selfie” wearing hearing protection and to comment on what they like or don’t like about the product in 140 characters or less—think Twitter. This exercise can give the safety manager valuable insight on which HPDs will be more readily adopted by their Millennial employees, which al- ways helps increase compliance.
Raising Awareness of Noise Pollution
Sound meter apps help raise the con- sciousness level of noise pollution; we can hope the increased awareness will lead to heightened levels of compliance for wear- ing the proper hearing protection at work. Who knows, maybe Millennials will begin to keep foam ear plugs in their purses or pockets alongside their smart phones.
Mary Padron is a MarCom specialist for Radians, a leading manufacturer of high- performance safety products.
www.ohsonline.com
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