Safety Training Net -May '24

Safety Meeting Sabotage, I Safety SPY Activities, Mental Health Awareness and Activity, and Heat Stress Infographic and Activity in English and Spanish 🕵🏻‍♀️🧘🏽‍♀️🥵

May 31, 2024

∙ Paid

What can safety professionals learn from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (the precursor to the CIA)? Probably a great many things but this post is about what we can learn from a World War II-era document titled the Simple Sabotage Field Manual created to provide ordinary citizens and resistance fighters with simple methods to disrupt enemy operations.

A key aspect of safety training is communication. If someone wanted to derail your safety training class or safety committee meeting, they could take lessons from this book. This manual talks about a variety of ways to weaken an organization but we’ll focus on what they call “decision sabotage,” i.e., interfering with decision-making so that it negatively affects an organization.

Some of these methods include raising irrelevant issues, (“Hey - why is the cafeteria food so bad”?), insisting on following unnecessary procedures (“We need to translate this into 4 languages first”) and refusing to share knowledge with colleagues (“Well I can’t remember who I ordered that material from last time”). To counteract these, you can share the following guidelines with committee members and trainees so meetings can be more successful.

Be mindful of how you communicate. Try to be clear, concise, and to the point. Avoid raising irrelevant issues or insisting on following unnecessary procedures.

Share information openly. When colleagues are reluctant to share information, it can be difficult to get a clear picture of the situation, and it can slow things down. By sharing information openly and transparently, you can help to ensure that everyone has the information they need to make informed decisions and progress on projects.

Be open to change. The world is constantly changing, so it's important to be open to new ideas and approaches. When others are resistant to change, it can make it difficult to adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

The cartoon below can be used to lead a discussion with your safety committees and others about how not to sabotage the committee’s work and progress. Additionally, a related infographic can be found on the SafetyFUNdamentals website.

VIP Subscribers - you can access a related game, I Safety SPY, with the link provided in the VIP Section.

Note: VIP Subscribers also received a free copy of the Five Essential Communication Skills for Safety Trainers eBook in the April ‘23 issue of The Safety Training Net. VIP subscribers can scroll to the bottom for the download link.

What’s In Your Bag?

What’s In Your Bag is a new section of The Safety Training Net where expert trainers and public speakers share what they carry with them to be as prepared as possible when delivering important information and key messages to audiences. Check out what’s in subscriber Christopher Garza’s bag. You might notice that Chris’s last items are quite unusual (peanut butter and jelly and bumble bee tuna). If you’d like to know more about how he uses these, you can reach Chris at cgarza@featherandmane.com.

Note: Would you like to share what’s in YOUR bag? Just reply to this email to volunteer and we can get started.

Safety and Health Events in June

VIP Subscribers received a safety calendar in the December 2023 issue. If you have joined since then and not yet downloaded your calendar, you can find the link in the VIP section below. Important S&H dates in the month of June offer several suggestions for safety and health training topics. An activity for one of these, heat stress, is shown below.

To download a Heat Stress Infographic Training Activity, including instructions, click here.

Upskilling - Mental Health Awareness

If you read the December VIP issue, you will be familiar with Upskilling in 2024. This chart includes suggested areas for professional development and each month, I include content on one of the topics as it relates to safety training.

Mental health is top of mind for many organizations these days. While most safety and health professionals may not be able to provide mental health services, they can provide training on the terminology and provide basic information as part of a total worker health program.

Mental Health Activity 1

The above illustration provides ideas for a workplace activity and could work as a bulletin board display as shown or the envelopes shown could simply be provided in a basket that allows individuals to pick out random cards. A collection of envelopes could also be provided in training classes and attendees asked to select one and act on the instructions inside. Each envelope should contain a card with a simple action related to positive mental health.

To gamify this activity, which might be necessary to increase participation, individuals could be asked to write a brief comment on the card related to the task they selected, add their name, and return the envelope to the organizer (that could be the safety trainer) in order to be eligible for a prize. Each returned and signed card could be equivalent to one chance in a drawing so the more an individual participates, the more chances they have to win. If budgets won’t allow for an enticing prize, even something as simple as a advantageous parking space for a week or a collection of safety swag could be offered.

The messages in the cards can be anything related to improving mental health and should offer relatively easy suggestions anyone could follow. Sample messages are shown below. For a full set of 60 different message options in printable form, click here.