Before following up on my previous eLearning post, I wanted
to point you to this article on Occupational Health & Safety Magazine’s
website entitled Understanding
Risk Control. It’s relevant and informative to our discussion on how to
address injury prevention beyond knowledge-based training, and looks more in
depth at the causes of injury and risk in the workplace.
More to come on eLearning soon…
We do unsafe things even though we know
they are unsafe. I’m pretty sure that we don’t always know why, but
sometimes because there are social and professional rewards for being unsafe,
or costs for being safe (taking breaks means you don't get promoted, saying
you're uncomfortable means you are a whiner). Sometimes it’s because we’re
lazy, and sometimes it’s because we're trapped in the middle of conflicting
information (deadlines are important, but so is taking your time).
What does this have to do with eLearning? Well... eLearning - and “education” generally - is designed to
impart knowledge and then test for the successful delivery of that knowledge to
a learner. The assumption for safety is that people who know how to work
safely will work safely. Questionable, eh?
While it’s entirely true that a person is more
likely to behave in safe ways if they know what is safe, what isn’t, and the potential consequences of acting unsafely, it is not
deterministic of safe behaviors. Knowing how to be safe is a necessary
but insufficient precondition for actually acting safely. In this
way, teaching safe behaviors is very unlike teaching something like math –
someone who knows that two + two = four is very unlikely to tell you that it
equals five. Experience (ahem…) tells me that knowing – for example –
that driving above the speed limit is unsafe does not result in people driving
safely.
If people do
unsafe things even though they know those activities are unsafe, then
lack of knowledge isn't the root cause of all injury. Therefore, any
intervention can and will fall short if trying to solve this problem by relying
exclusively on education and knowledge in the hands of the could-be-injured person.
|
Injury
|
Cause
|
Cure
|
|
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
|
Lack of knowledge of causes and symptoms
|
eLearning
|
|
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
|
Overworked
|
Different incentive structures for employee behavior
|
|
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
|
Manager is relentless in focus on productivity
|
Increase manager accountability for injury rates in
conjunction with productivity
|
Put simply, eLearning is a great solution
if the root cause of your problem is fundamentally a lack of knowledge. Sophisticated
systems for understanding root causes might say
something like, "eLearning is a great solution when injuries are occurring
because of a cognitive root cause."
Next post, we’ll dig into some things our
customers are doing to prevent injuries that blend with eLearning and other
solutions, based on their understanding of root causes within their
organizations.
Here’s
an interesting editorial piece from the NY Times on Obama’s nomination of David
Michaels for the head of OSHA. It references an article (page 10)
written by Michaels himself in December.
I’m excited about this nomination! Michaels seems interested
in promoting a “culture” of safety, and restoring the government’s progress in
improving workers' safety—if his nomination is confirmed by the senate, we may
see changes in many companies’ injury prevention planning.