In recent articles, we’ve listed 6 Common Triggers of an OSHA Inspection and 10 Hazards OSHA Inspectors Commonly Look For, and both articles drew a lot of reader attention.
As a result, in this article we’re going to explain what typically happens during an OSHA inspection. And in the future, look for another article on how to prepare for an OSHA inspection.
With that intro down, let’s learn more about exactly what you can expect to happen when an OSHA inspector shows up at your worksite.
A little-known poet once asked “what’s in a name?”
It’s not often that you get to refer to William Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet when writing about safety training, but events at the most recent meeting of the committee to create ANSI/ASSE Z490.2 as a complement to the existing Z490.1 standard, gave me an opportunity to do just that. (Those events plus the tireless efforts my junior high English teacher, that is.)
But why, you might ask? Because we spent a good deal of time talking about the definition of “online safety training,” which is especially relevant since that’s what the standard is about.
Over time, in discussions about the standard and in various drafts of the standard, we’ve been using terms like virtual training, distance training, elearning, online training, and more. And we’ve discussed the amazing variety of types of training this includes–streaming online videos; HTML web pages; elearning courses in SCORM, AICC, and/or xAPI formats; augmented reality viewed through smart glasses; virtual reality; simulations; and more.
So this notion of “what is online safety training” really isn’t as simple as it first appears. Although, perhaps it smells just as sweet by any name.
What are your opinions?
Stay tuned for more about Z490.2 in our next update.
Learn how to evaluate the different online safety training solutions that exist to find one that best fits your company’s needs with our FREE informative guide and checklist.
In our continuing efforts to provide our customers with the most flexible and cost-effective access to our quality eLearning training content, Convergence Training now offers annual streaming subscriptions to our most popular online training course libraries and series.
In addition to our online pay-per-view format and SCORM/AICC licensing options, you can now subscribe to some of our comprehensive course libraries, including Health and Safety, HR Compliance and Soft Skills, and Corrugated Packaging. You can also get some great value by subscribing to a more focused set of courses within a series, such as Cranes and Rigging, Hazardous Materials, Lockout & Energy Control, and many more!
Just browse our eLearning courses online to find the best fit for your needs. And please don’t hesitate to let us know when you have questions. We’ll be happy to help.
Wondering if you should make the plunge with online safety training? This guide gives 10 reasons why, each based on experiences at real companies like yours.
We’re pretty excited because Arun Pradhan, a self-described “learning geek,” a senior learning and performance consultant at DeakinCo., the winner of the Australian Institute of Training and Development’s 2017 L&D Professional of the Year Award, and the creator of the amazing Learn2Learn app has agreed to speak with us about the importance of learning ability in the workplace, being a learning organization, and in particular how employees can learn to learn and become lifelong learners.
If you’re reading this article, you probably already know the importance of learning at work and have a sense that it will become increasingly important in the future. Maybe you’re a manager who wants to learn to improve at your own job while also seeing how you can facilitate employee learning at the same time. Or maybe you’re an employee who knows the value of learning to improve your career opportunities.
Either way, we think you’ll benefit from and enjoy Arun’s insights, and we want to thank him very much for participating in this interview and for all the works he does in workforce L&D.
It’s always a good idea to use training methods that are (1) based in evidence and proven to be effective and (2) focused on improving performance on the job.
Dr. Will Thalheimer is one of the leading research experts on evidence-based and performance-focused training methods, and he’s been kind enough to grant us an interview that we’ll present as a series of four related articles.
In this article, our interview with Dr. Thalheimer will focus on smile sheets.
You may already know the term smile sheet, but if you don’t, you’re probably familiar with the concept. You know those surveys trainers hand out to learners who have just completed some form of training? And the learner then uses the survey to evaluate the training event, materials, and instructor? That’s a smile sheet, also known as a training evaluation sheet, reaction sheet, or a Kirkpatrick level 1 evaluation.
These learner evaluations are sometimes called smile sheets, however, because there’s a belief that the learners may not use them to put down truthful, objective, helpful information, but instead just write nice comments about the training and the instructor that are meant to make the trainer smile about supposedly having done a good job.
So you see the problem. If a smile sheet is nothing but a bunch of well-intended but fake or meaningless “smiles,” we’re not drawing helpful information from learners about the training material that we can use to evaluate the training and revise it if necessary so our training has a desired influence on worker job performance. And that’s why Dr. Thalheimer has done research on smile sheets, first to determine that as commonly written they’re often meaningless and second to give us tips on how to write better smile sheets that will help improve performance.
If all this is ringing a bell for you, you may be familiar with Dr. Thalheimer’s great book Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form or with the earlier article we wrote exploring his book on how to write better smile sheets.
So let’s check out the interview. Remember this is one part of a longer interview with Dr. Thalheimer, and we’ll have additional articles in which he discusses:
We’ve recently released many of our courses in a variety of languages to meet growing international demand for our online training. Several years ago, we began developing courses in both English and Spanish to meet the needs of Spanish-speakers throughout the U.S. Now, in coordination with multinational customers, we’ve produced multilingual courses in the following languages:
Visit our Multilingual Courses page for more details on which courses are available in which languages. And as always, feel free to contact us with any questions. We’ll be happy to help!
Wondering if you should make the plunge with online safety training? This guide gives 10 reasons why, each based on experiences at real companies like yours.
Sadly, shootings, gun violence, and gun-related killings are a part of our culture and society. That’s true in all walks of life, including in the workplace and at schools.
That reality means it’s important for every workplace to know what to do if an active shooter is in their site of work. To help your organization create a plan, we’ve just released our new Active Shooter Response online training course.
The course will explain best actions to take when an active shooter is in the workplace and also describe how to interact with law enforcement officers or other first responders who arrive on the scene.
Read on to learn more about our active shooter response course. We’ve included a short sample video and a list of the course learning objectives to help you evaluate it for your workplace.
I recently finished reading the book Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety by Dr. Todd Conklin. It’s a great introduction to Human and Organizational Performance, also known as HOP.
HOP is a systems-based approached originated with safety thought leaders like Conklin, Sidney Dekker, and James Reason. It has been adopted by General Electric and other companies, and was the focus of the exciting and somewhat-controversial plenary session at the ASSE Safety 2017 Conference (I’ve included a video recording of that HOP/BBS discussion near the bottom of this article). HOP has much in common with safety differently, new safety, safety 2, etc.
If you’ve wanted an introduction to Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) and/or to Conklin’s thoughts, this book is a good starting point. In our article below, we provide some key points from the book. If you’ve read the book yourself, or if you’re using HOP at work for safety, please leave additional comments at the bottom of the article.
For even more on Dr. Conklin, check our article based on Conklin’s books about Workplace Fatalities and Learning Teams for Accident Investigations.
Anytime you have an unexpected outcome at work, it’s worth investigating to determine why. That’s especially true in safety. One way to do this is to perform a root cause analysis.
That’s why we’ve offered our new online Root-Cause Analysis training course.
The course explains a number of different methods for performing a root-cause analysis.
For more information about this new course, including a short sample video and a list of the course learning objectives, read on.
Hello Safety Ohioans!
We’ll be attending the Ohio Safety Congress & Expo in Columbus, Ohio on March 7-9, 2018 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center.
Come swing by booth 844, we’d love to meet you and say hi!
We’ll be showing off our award-winning solutions for safety and health training, including online safety and health courses, online mining safety/MSHA compliance courses, and learning management systems (LMSs) that help you manage and administer all your training, including tracking, reporting, managing due dates and expirations, and much more.
Feel free to shoot us off an email if you’ve got a question between now and then. Otherwise, why not download our free guide to effective safety training? You’ll find it a great resource.
Learn how to design, create, deliver, and evaluate effective EHS training by following these best practices with our free step-by-step guide.
In this article, we’re going to look at some best practices for getting and keeping employee participation in your workplace occupational health and safety management system, or OHSMS.
This is one of a series of articles looking at occupational health and safety management systems (OHSMS). We’ve got links for all the articles at the bottom for you.
The series is based on ANSI Z10, Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. We recommend that you buy a copy of the Z10 standard for yourself. There’s a lot of great information in it, including many helpful helpful appendixes. And the cost is only $105, a great safety investment for your organization.
And now let’s turn our attention to employee participation in your health and safety management system.
One of the best practices of safety management systems at work is to perform safety inspections and create a system for collecting and acting on safety observations.
To help your organization with that, we’ve just released our new Safety Inspections and Observations training course.
The course provides a helpful overview, which you can use to be proactive in reducing incident rates at your workplace.
For more information about this new course, including a short sample video and a list of the course learning objectives, read on.
