H1N1 and business continuity in the event of a pandemic are very hot topics at the moment.  Many of our customers have been using the Safety Bulletin feature within SafetySync to remind employees of sick leave policies, hand washing protocols and various other best practices that can help prevent the spread of diseases within your organizations.  You may want to supplement these bulletins and policies with some training.

We've recently produced a lesson within the Emergency Preparedness and Response course called "Pandemics".  This course summarizes a lot of the information being distributed by CDC in the United States and by Health Canada.  Topics include:
                          What is a Pandemic?
                          Preparing for Pandemics
                          Signs of the Flu and H1N1
                          What to Do if You Become Sick
                          Preventing the Spread of Viruses
                          Business Continuity Planning

Offering this 13 minute lesson to your employees might just keep a few people from becoming sick, and missing a significant amount of work.  We also have a great video produced by the Center for Disease Control on "Infections and Hand Washing" in the "Health and Wellness" course.

Stay healthy everyone!

We've recently begun adding OSHA safety training videos to our library.  OSHA have developed over a dozen of these videos over the past few decades and recently made them available for download on their website as a public service.  Some of the topics are highly relevant to safety awareness training, including Bloodborne Pathogens, the first OSHA lesson our software will now track.

The video is long (22 minutes) and is a bit dated; it was produced back in the early 1990's at the height of the AIDS scare.  It is nonetheless useful for any workers that may be expected to perform first aid on an injured employee.

If you would like to check out the video, or if you'd like to add it to your safety awareness training program, administrators can find it under the Health and Wellness course.

Other OSHA videos that are tracked on our system include: Musculoskeletal Disorders and Ergonomics, Cranes Supervision, Fall Protection Equipment, and Ground Fall Protection.

Some organizations that sell equipment and tools, put out videos on how to safely operate their equipment.  For the most part, these videos linger somewhere on the Internet, but for the most part go unnoticed.  This is a shame, because these organizations have the resources to create top-notch videos.

STIHL is one of these companies.  Their video on how to safely operate chainsaws is a bit old, but highly informative.  We've added the ability to assign this video to employees in your organization, and we've written a test to verify that the key points are understood.  If you have chainsaws at any of your sites, you may consider adding an extra 7 minutes of orientation time by including this lesson.  It can be found under the 'Tools and Equipment' course.

Our 'Black Bears and Grizzly Bears' lesson has been one of the most popular with customers in Western Canada that operate in bear country.  The feedback on this lesson is always great.  Nonethleless, we've added the ability to assign a new bear safety video to your employees.  The US National Parks Service prepared a "Hiking in Bear Country" video which covers essentially the same topics.  Although not quite as long or as detailed as the default lesson, it does have some interesting video and commentary by a wildlife biologist working at Glacier National Park.  You can view both versions in Company Administration, then choose which is best suited for your employees.
                  

Few safety managers know that Worksafe BC has a great collection of safety awareness videos available free of charge on their website.  They even have a 70 minute WHMIS video, which is comparable to $20 to $30 versions available elsewhere online.  Why aren't more people using these videos?  It's because there's no way to track which employees have taken the courses, or in other words, no Safety Management System to administer the training.

The website does offer the ability to send email links to as many as 10 addresses, which helps inform other potential students that the courses are available.  The "system" ends there unfortunately.  No reminders, no tracking, no expiry, no reporting.

That's where SafetySync comes in.  We've incorporated these videos into our system as alternatives to our avatar-instructed courses.  We've added a few features to ensure the system works as it should:
   1.  We provide users the choice of quality for the videos.  This allows faster downloads for users with slow internet connections.
   2.  Users cannot fast-forward the videos.  This ensures that all employees do not skip ahead without watching the videos.
   3.  We've added quizzes to the lessons.  This ensures that employees understand the material.

Customers that have enabled these Worksafe BC versions into their SafetySync SMS report that the videos offer some much appreciated variation, which helps keep their employees interested throughout their orientation and training.  Administrators can preview all versions without acutally turning them on, so feel free to check them out.  You will be impressed.  Although a handful of the videos as a bit old, they are well-produced, and have just the right amount of humour or gore, when appropriate.

The list of lessons is extensive, including the aforementioned WHMIS, as well as Tagout / Lockout, Fall Protection, Overhead Powerlines, and Emergency Response Planning.

At the request of one of our larger customers, we've created a new version (3.0) of our Elevated Falls lesson (the 4th lesson in the Fall Prevention course).  Steve now explains the appropriate application for a self-retracting lifeline on the 'Fall Restraint (Positioning) Systems' slide.  The most significant change is at the end of the lesson, where there is an entirely new slide called Descent & Rescue Plan.  The changes added 3 minutes to the old lesson, which was 10 minutes.  Administrators can choose either version, however new customers will default to the latest version.  As always, please leave feedback if you'd like further changes!

In my last blog post I mentioned Amazon's new electronic book (the Kindle), and how it's helping lead the tranformation from paper to electronic documents.  The other interesting development coming out of the Kindle is its computer-generated voice; and it's a decent one at that (listen here for a sample reading on YouTube).

Computer-generated voices are getting better and the overall acceptance of these voices are also improving.  Phone systems were the first to use this technology, but they're now used in GPS navigation systems, electronic books, and even online safety training.

As you may or may not know, the 130+ safety training lessons available on the SAFETYSYNC online Safety Management System all feature computer-generated voices.  Reaction to our training lessons is mixed.  There are users that are surprized to find out it's not a real person narrating the lesson, others are aware that the narration is computer-generated, but are unoffended by it, and there are some that have a hard time with it.  Fortunately the last group is in the minority, and when we check the feedback scores on these lessons, they are very high.

I must admit that the voices we use are highly advanced.  The method we use is called concatenative speech synthesis, and it is now the dominant format for computerized speech.  As text-to-speech technology improves, we will update our lessons.  Some day, our users may not even notice the difference.

Text-to-speech allows us to develop courses quickly, which leads to lower cost to our customers, and a more complete course selection.  Check out our sample lesson and quiz, and post a comment to let us know what you think!

There really is no right answer to this question.  The merits of safety training are highly subjective.  There are three perspectives to look at when considering the depth of safety training to provide:
      1.  Legal requirements,
      2.  Industry requirements, and
      3.  Your moral conscience

Legal requirements are horribly vague on overall safety training.  Here in Alberta, the OH&S regulations barely mention safety training.  Section 15 merely states that employees should be trained on "equipment" and "harmful substances", with the latter being an almost complete overlap with WHMIS.  OH&S legislation in each province relies heavily on "principles" and "due diligence".  You develop your safety programs (including training) according to the principles, then if anything goes wrong, you must prove you were diligent in satisfying the requirements, based on what your industry peers would be reasonably expected to do.

So that leads us to the next consideration; industry requirements.  Certain industries, such as oil and gas, or construction, have industry associations which provide guidance in the form of "Industry Recommended Practices" or IRP's.  Enform is one of the most thorough at fulfilling this role.  On safety training specifically, they've written IRP 16, which they call Basic Safety Awareness Training.  At SafetySync, we like this document so much, we essentially used their Appendix C as a roadmap for developing our inventory of safety training courses.  The problem is, with this strategy, we've now accumulated over 120 lessons, which total 26 hours of training, and we still have a few of the more obscure topics to go!

26 hours of safety training does seem at first like an awful lot.  Especially with Enform's own Petroleum Safety Training (or PST as it is often called) running at about 6 hours.  Why the big difference?  As it turns out, some of the items in Enform's IRP 16 Appendix C are barely covered by their own Petroleum Safety Training.  For example, PST conveniently leaves out Transportation of Dangerous Goods, which on its own runs a good 3 hours or more.  How can they leave TDG out and just brush on a few other topics listed in Appendix C?  Section 16.8.2 of IRP 16 (Program Content) basically states that "a worker's orientation may include only those topics relevant to the company's operations".  Enform made a judgment call and decided TDG and other topics were not worthy of going into too much detail, and rubber-stamped their own training system regardless of the shortcoming.

Does that mean that if you work in oil and gas, you can just buy the $2,000 PST CD-ROM and be done with it?*

It depends if your moral conscience will allow it.  There are many more hazards in your line of work besides those touched-on in PST.  And there is considerably more knowledge pertaining to those hazards that might help your workers remain safe.   Up until recently though, there was no cost effective way of providing that information to employees.  Some large companies, like Precision Drilling and Trican incur tremendous expense to bring all their employees to a centralized location for 5 days (40 hours!) of safety orientation and training.  In most cases though, employers and safety professionals counted on supervisors to fill in the blanks.  But if you choose the latter route, can you prove the training took place?  And can you be sure your workers have been given the safety knowledge they need, especially with today's mobile workforce?

Fortunately, with the advent of online safety training, this extensive knowledge is readily available, and can be disseminated to anyone, at any time.  Some providers (like SAFETYSYNC) allow safety managers to pick and choose which lessons to provide each position within their organization.  In other words, you can leave out the lessons on Asbestos and Silica Dust if your workers never encounter those hazards.  With the right tweaking, you can probably pare 26 hours of training down to about 15.  And if your workers have access to the internet at the job site, they can take their training during slow periods while they wait for cement to harden or paint to dry.

So, to answer the question...  You should provide your employees with safety training on any topic that is relevant to their work.  This approach will satisfy legal, industry and your own moral obligations.  Fortunately, with advanced online training systems, you can now do this easily, and without breaking the bank!


*NOTE:  If your moral conscience allows you to provide just enough training to satisfy the requirements, and cost-savings is your primary objective, there is an even cheaper alternative to PST.  Enform granted equivalency to the Construction Safety Training System (CSTS), which only takes about 3 and a half hours, and runs about $45 per person.  Buyer beware though; it is not an online training solution, and like PST, it does not cover all the elements listed in IRP 16 Appendix C.

We've only been offering online safety training for a few months, yet we've heard this statement countless times already.  Although I'm reluctant to turn down a potential sale, I'm pretty sure we'd be doing a disservice to the individual. 

The reason is pretty simple.  The employer must provide the training.  Health Canada clearly states that the employer has a legal obligation to ensure that his or her workers have received WHMIS and site-specific material hazard training.  Transport Canada even goes further and requires that the employer sign the training certificate for TDG.  How can an employer sign a certificate for training it had no hand in providing?

This is not to say that every employer needs to hire an instructor and set up a training facility in the office or shop.  WHMIS and TDG can still be outsourced, but the employer needs to verify that the training is appropriate for the environment the individual is likely to encounter.  In nearly every case, the "generic" training provided by various training facilities and online providers must be supplemented with material-specific training.  This means that if part of a workers responsibility is to handle propane cylinders, then that individual needs to know more than just the classes propane falls under for WHMIS and TDG.

The early online providers of WHMIS and TDG training do not offer these additional lessons.  And even if they did, I doubt the lessons could be added piecemeal.  At SAFETYSYNC, we've worked hard to build a broad catalog of material hazard courses.  We've also designed our application so that safety administrators can turn on or off the various lessons for each position within their organization.  No doubt some level of on-the-job training will always be needed, but our system will hopefully take care of most of the bases.

I believe that over time training facilities will garner less and less of the WHMIS and TDG training market due to the simple fact that facility training cannot be customized to the individual.  Online training providers will also evolve, allowing administrators to add (and remove) certain lessons from these courses.  It may take some time, since it means abandoning the per-course charge nearly all providers follow, in favor of the flat rate pricing system that SAFETYSYNC uses.  Utimately, it will mean a better experience for workers too, since they will only have to sit through lessons that are relevant to their positions.