In our last update on the progress of the upcoming ANSI/ASSE Z490.2 standard for Online EHS Training, we covered some discussions the committee had about the meaning of the phrase “online safety training.”

This time, we’re going to talk about process. The process of getting a bunch of hard-working, busy people to coordinate efforts on the creation of a national standard even though they work in different cities, on different schedules, and with different additional responsibilities beyond just writing national standards.

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A quick head’s up that we’ve got a helpful article in the May, 2018 issue of Professional Safety, the official magazine of the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE).

The article is about selecting qualified safety trainers. It gives you some tips from the ASSE/ANSI z490.1 EHS training standard and, in addition, some tips for “training up” staff to be more qualified safety trainers. It also includes a list of some of the best learning professionals in the world to learn from (more on that below) to continue sharpening your training skills.

As always, we encourage you to check out the ASSE, their Professional Safety magazine, and of course their ANSI Z490.1 standard for environmental, health, and safety training. We’re on the committee to create that standard and you can read more about that here, here,  here and here.

Read on to learn more, to see a list of recommended learning professionals to learn from, and to download a free buyer’s guide to online safety training.

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With the new superhero movie Avengers: Infinity War coming out soon, we thought we’d take a little break from the seriousness of our usual discussions about training, safety, manufacturing, and similar topics and put together workforce training suggestions for some of the superheroes who will appear in the upcoming Avengers movie.

This is one of a series of humor-based articles we do at Convergence Training from time to time. In addition to this one, feel free to check out some of these:

• Zombie Safety Training
• Workforce and Safety Training Suggestions for a Family Thanksgiving
• Super Bowl Party Safety Training Suggestions
• Workforce Training Suggestions from TV Series “Breaking Bad“
• Sharknado Safety Training
• Valentine’s Day Safety Poem
• Safety Training for March Madness
• Safety Training for the Mayan Apocalypse

With that said, let’s take a look at our suggestions of Safety Training for Superheroes. We’ve even included the trailer for the Avengers: Infinity War movie near the bottom of this post for you!

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At some workplaces, incidents occur and there’s no thought given to incident investigations. This is a no-no.

At others, probably most, incidents occur and are followed by an incident investigation that attempts to identify a single root cause and then put in a corrective action to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. This is probably the most common response to incidents at organizations.

But there are criticisms of that second, common method, which might be considered the traditional safety approach to incidents and incident investigations. One criticism is that it’s overly simplistic, with its emphasis on identifying a single root cause instead of noting the interplay of interrelated systemic issues. Another criticism is that the explanation often–too often–claims that a worker made a poor decision, often the result of not following procedures. And a third is that the corrective action often boils down to simply providing training and perhaps enforcing discipline on the worker who’s thought to be the cause of the problem.

In his book Pre-Accident Investigations: Better Questions–An Applied Approach to Operational Learning, Dr. Todd Conklin makes the points above about some of the problems with a traditional safety incident investigation approach at work and makes a recommendation for a different approach: learning teams.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Conklin’s book and recommendations. As always, we recommend that in addition to reading the article, you get the information straight from the expert as well, so please buy Dr. Conklin’s book (all three of them, really) and/or listen to the video of Dr. Conklin speaking at the ASSE Safety 2017 national conference, which we’ve included at the bottom of this article.

For those of you who have been reading along as I’ve been reading Dr. Conklin’s works, you’ll know this is the third such treatment we’ve done here at the Convergence Training blog. The other articles include:

• 9 Things You Should Know About Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), based on Dr. Conklin’s book Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety
• Preventing Workplace Fatalities, based on Dr. Conklin’s book Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict

So with all that said, let’s get to learning about learning teams for building the safety capacity of your organization.

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The number of workers in the US who speak Spanish as a primary or even a sole language is large and is growing.

As a result, trainers who don’t speak, write, or understand Spanish often struggle to communicate with those workers. And that inability to communicate can have serious negative consequences for organizations, trainers, and employees, including creating serious safety risks.

And don’t forget that it’s an OSHA requirement that safety training be provided in a language the employee can understand.

Although there’s no one simple solution to this issue, one way to address it is to use online safety training at work that’s multi-language, allowing the worker to select the language they’d prefer to complete the training in.

In the article below, we’ll talk you through that a little more.

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Did you know that as recently as 2016, the construction industry had the highest number of deaths by suicide amongst all industries, and that it had the second highest rate of suicide?

Sadly, both are true. Mental health issues, including depression and suicide, are a very serious problem in the construction industry.

Here at Convergence Training, we’ve been friends with Cal Beyer for quite some time. Cal’s the Director of Risk Management at Lakeside Industries in Issaquah, WA, but more to the point he’s a tireless advocate on the issue of suicide in the construction industry. If you’ve attended safety conferences in the Pacific Northwest, you may have seen Cal out speaking on the topic.

Cal was nice enough to participate in the interview below in which he explains the scope of the problem and gives us all some tips for trying to deal more productively with it to help save lives and reduce suffering. Thanks to Cal for all of his efforts and for taking the time to share what he knows with us here.

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