The ‘Holy Grail’ of a safe workplace
The magical program that reduces workplace injury to zero. The employee community that is so well trained, back injuries are forever banished from the land. An employee base that never takes unnecessary risks, just to get the job done.
Wishful thinking, right?
But what if it doesn’t have to be the thing that is just out of reach? What if there is a world in which the above is possible? Maybe it’s not realistic, but it could be possible.
It might just be a matter of finding the CLUE.
C: Curiosity
We sometimes forget that the best experts when it comes to choosing a safe lifting program are the employees themselves. They, better that anyone else in the organization (including management and admin), know what their daily tasks demand of them. And they know the challenges they each face as they meet those demands.
Being curious about what they are dealing with daily often helps us look at the next steps to take in the matter of a safety training program. Asking questions and setting aside our own judgements of their answers goes a long way.
L: Listen, Look, Learn
These three L’s can be used interchangeably in this context. When we say ‘listen’, we mean active listening. It’s Listening to understand, rather than listening to respond or reply. It’s getting over in their world so that we share their experiences of a particular situation or challenge. Listening is a discipline and an art.
Looking is about being willing to acknowledge what we’ve been pretending not-to-know. It’s not necessarily willful, or intentional. Very often, we refuse to see things because of biases, expectations, and the drive to git’r’done. But when we’re willing to stop and look, really look, we may see what we missed before.
Learning can happen when we make a mistake, and apply corrective action. But it can also happen because we happen upon a way that works to accomplish a task. We learn from our mistakes, true. But we also learn from our successes.
U: Uncover
Distinct from learning, above, Uncovering is about discovery. It’s finding out a new aspect of an existing issue, or asking the kind of question that leads us down an unexpected path. It can happen when we’re honest about what’s working and what’s not working. Sometimes we can uncover something that we didn’t even know that we didn’t know.
E: Examine
When we examine something, we observe it closely. We note its properties, its effects, and how it interacts with us and its surroundings. We understand its place and its uses. Examining something can often involve the previous three components: it can create a new level of curiosity about something that is familiar; we can Listen, Look, and Learn something new all over again; and we often Uncover something we didn’t know before. At the Examine stage, we can prime ourselves to be curious once again about what’s working and not working.
Meeting your employees’ safety needs is a matter of finding the right clue
And we won’t pretend that its easy.
It’s about the willingness to be authentically interested in what’s important to them. And beginning by being intentionally curious can open your employees up to sharing their challenges with you, such that you can work with them to create a safety training program that brings that holy grail just that much closer.
We’re here to help
At PowerLift®, we know that you’re committed to the safety, health and wellbeing of your employees. We offer training programs that empower employees from every level of the company to become safety leaders among their peers. The PowerLift® method of lifting physical loads is efficient, productive, and most importantly, reduces injuries significantly.
We invite you to read a couple of our case studies and see how PowerLift® Trainings might be able to help you protect your employees from injury.
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