Page 62 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2019

TRAINING
bullying, girl drama, defiant students, etc. What’s also interesting is that out of the 1,200 or so of these teachers or principals who attend these conferences, there is probably not one of them who is uninformed or uneducated about the dangers of obesity or ex- treme obesity. But how much would you be willing to bet that there was not one obese or extremely obese teacher or principal in at- tendance. If you had to take a guess what percentage of them can- not (obviously) manage their own eating behavior: higher or lower than the national average? So, education or knowing the risks isn’t going to be enough. Do you think it is skill development? That they just don’t know how to cook healthy meals, or they don’t know how to exercise or work out?
Perhaps the most extreme example of this are the people who ask smokers, “Don’t you know that smoking is bad for you?” Re- ally? I thought coughing your lungs out every morning is what all people did. . . .
So when you talk about safety training, are you simply trying to get a check mark in the box or are you trying to get safe behavior?
If the answer (hopefully) is safe behavior, then it’s important to look at successful behavior change initiatives to see what compo- nents they have in common, how long they take, and really delve into why they work. This is called studying “positive deviance.” Un- fortunately, when it comes to real behavior change there are lots of programs or initiatives out there, but very few that actually work. But there are some. Alas, they usually require more than education or reading a book or a magazine article on a new diet. Why would anyone bother to go to meetings, whether it was Weight Watchers, AA, NA, or, for that matter, church, temple, or mosque, when you can just buy the magazine with the new “miracle” diet, stop buying the booze, and simply read the Bible or Koran, etc.?
Self-help books are available in every bookstore, and yet hardly anyone else became Tony Robbins. Most people have read the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Can you even remember the 7 habits? Furthermore, are you practicing them? So what does it take to change behavior? What does it take to get people to change their habits? The answer is more than education and skill development. But they all get called training.
Beyond Carrots and Sticks
We are all familiar with the ABC model from Skinner. However, the ABC model requires that external consequences are provided. The old carrot and stick methodology. But that requires that some- one provides the carrot, or someone beats you with a stick. If you can get someone to provide carrots, it works, and if someone beats you with a stick, it works. Both cost time and money. Not to men- tion that the stick rarely makes people happy, which is why there’s a comical expression: “the beatings will continue until morale im- proves.” Or perhaps you’ve heard the corporate version: “The fir- ings will continue until morale improves.” But with safety, you can only enforce so many things.
You can enforce wearing seat belts when driving and, to a lesser extent, you can enforce not driving with a hand-held device. But you can’t enforce “eyes on task” and “mind on task” when driving or working. It’s difficult to enforce “moving your eyes before you move.” And yet, how important is it for people to be paying atten- tion when driving a car, truck, forklift, or some other piece of mo- bile equipment like a Genie boom? How important is moving your
eyes first before you move the vehicle? Isn’t it more important than the seat belt? Not that I’m saying get rid of the seat belt, or anything else. But if you could enforce everything you needed to in safety, I know some companies who would gladly beat the people to death if that would produce zero injuries or zero harm.
(Hopefully you found that humorous.)
Can you change behavior from the inside out, instead of sup- plying external consequences?
After all, nobody is ever trying to get hurt, and with the excep- tion of combat and contact sports, nobody is ever trying to hurt anybody else, either. So it shouldn’t be a problem, right? All we need to do is educate them and they will all change, right? Bet- ter still, we’ll put it online and manage it with an LMS (learning management system) and it will all improve automatically, right? Perhaps the latest folly is that we will educate people on the neu- roscience so that, once they know how their brains work, they will experience zero injuries.
Daniel Kahneman wrote a brilliant book called “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” However, he also expressed his extreme disappointment that even the students he taught—with the proof he developed through scientific experiments—didn’t change their behavior.
Okay, so enough with the ideas that don’t work. What does work? And what does it really take to change behavior?
Well, it takes a lot, and it almost always takes time, especially if you have to change a habitual behavior. There are a few common things: It usually takes a “live body” at the front of the room. And this person has to believe in what he or she is saying (nothing worse than a preacher who looks like he doesn’t believe). In other words, they have to be speaking from the heart and have to be “practicing what they’re preaching.” Safety people are notorious for preach- ing—but off the job . . . sometimes they talk or text when they drive, or they don’t tie the ladder off when working at home. They don’t do a risk assessment before starting a renovation project, or they don’t shut all the power off when rewiring the basement, or they don’t wear eye protection and hearing protection when mowing the lawn.
I’ve even heard some of them say, “I hope nobody I work with sees me.” But whether they see you or not, chances are they have their doubts. And if they don’t believe that you believe, there’s little chance you’ll really influence them positively.
So we need a live body at the front of the room who can in- fluence people positively, or someone on camera who can come across equally convincingly on the screen (only so many of those).
Next, there has to be a group of people who mean something to you who are also participating or involved, like the other people at the meeting or in the congregation, etc. This relevant community, or the people you are with, are very important. It has to matter to you what they think of you. A group of total strangers isn’t going to be nearly as effective.
And of course, the change has to be achievable. In other words, it has to be possible: Dunking the basketball like Michael Jordan won’t be possible unless, in my case, they lower the rim to six feet. So it has to be doable. But we can all put seat belts and safety glasses on, so being able to do it isn’t really much of an issue with safety. The real issue is, “Is the change worth it or worth the effort?”
This gets complicated with certain decisions, but it’s much more difficult if the behavior has already become a habit or if we are deal-
58 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2019
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