As corporate profit margins get tight and companies begin to squeeze their labor dollars, one will find that the first line item of scrutiny for any financial officer is the amount of money spent on a training budget. Experts on both sides of the issue argue daily about the indirect financial impact of well-trained employees vs. the direct expenditures of having them trained. For many companies, the trend of relying on video training and computer-based training programs (CBTs) has been the perfect blend of information dump and cost-efficiency.

In many cases these media provide maximum information in a minimum amount of time. They are usually well-made, presented by articulate narrators and possess the added leisure of being able to train at will without chewing up trainers' man-hours.

But in the realm of forklift and other industrial safety subjects, they are a ticking bomb.

What many companies fail to consider when discussing the options of video training and CBTs is that workplace safety is NOT a place to cut corners. The money saved by using these methods may be far overshadowed by the cost to your business if something goes wrong. Some of the main items to consider are:

OSHA's requirements for training on these subjects The liability aspects of accidents, which are more likely if training is weak The inability of these media to promote information retention and thereby keep people safe

Because OSHA Said So, That's Why.

Since 1999, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has required that all forklift safety training in particular (and many other equipment safety instruction requirements reflect this decision as well) must be site- and equipment-specific (operators must physically demonstrate to a trainer that they can safely operate their machinery in the exact workplace where they will do so) and training and evaluation must be done by a knowledgeable person qualified to teach adult students. Roughly translated: if you rely on a video tape or CBT only as your training program and then walk away, the first time something goes wrong (and it will), OSHA is going to take a look at your training system, deem it inadequate, and hold your company responsible.

OSHA realizes that people need to have the benefit of safety training that does more than check off a box on a to-do list. Their job is keeping people alive at work, period. That's why they developed this rule. They want the assurance that a person who can react to specific needs of the trainees and the company is on hand to fill in the gaps and personally ascertain that the student has learned what he or she needs. Videos and computers don't do that. They keep plugging along. They'll talk to no one and still think they did the job well. A human trainer will look for that light bulb over the head of his or her students before moving on. When the subject is safety, OSHA wants to see far more than lip service thrown at the problem.

So you reduced the training budget by $3,000 and cost yourself $3.5 million in fines and damages. How much did you save again?

How much can one forklift accident cost you? Well, let's break it down:

1) OSHA fines can be between $7,000 and $70,000 per willful safety violation. If they visit (and after an accident, it's highly likely) and find that you have 10 forklifts and no one is wearing the safety belts on them, that's 10 fines. And those operators weren't trained properly? 10 more fines. And they all drive too fast? 10 more fines. You see the pattern.

2) Medical bills. These can get very expensive, and usually warehouse-type injuries can involve weeks or months of recovery time. The bill is getting larger.

3) Lost man-hours. You now have one or more experienced workers out of commission. Now work is not getting done. Productivity suffers.

4) The possible lawsuit. What if the person injured was hit by a forklift driven by a poorly-trained individual? Now his or her lawyer is drooling over your bank account. To make matters worse, if OSHA finds you at fault for willful safety violations, the plaintiff's legal team will have that information in hand going into court.

5) Punitive damages. At the end of the lawsuit comes the largest hit of all. This number can have many zeros at the end of it.

6) More training. Ironically, now that you have injured your experienced worker, you have to spend money to train a less experienced one to do his or her job.

So, tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands in fines, another couple hundred thousand for medical bills, a couple more in settlement, maybe a quarter of a million to several million in punitive damages, several more thousand to train a new person, and all the while productivity and morale is down. It hardly seems like you saved anything by cutting corners, does it? Would you take a gamble like that at any racetrack or casino in the world?

How people learn is as important as what they learn, to a trainer.

If you want to guarantee retention of information (and in safety training, you DO!), then you need to employ methods that cause people to learn. Most people are kinesthetic learners; they pick up information better by being physically involved. They also have relatively short attention spans. They might watch a 10-minute video, but anything more, and they are sleeping or doodling, waiting for the misery to end. CBTs may keep their attention a bit longer due to extra participation, but the usual pattern for trainees is memorization to answer the questions, not retention to show the instructor that they are smart. Remember, people are social animals; not looking dumb to their peers or trainers is a far greater motivator than their personal quest to get 100% on the pop quiz at the end of the module.

Canned training has another important shortcoming that can be a serious detriment in safety training situations - it is impersonal; it may not apply to everyone in the room equally. For example, though it may seem like a mundane detail, a narrator on a videotape wearing a suit and tie and speaking with a British accent may not hold much credibility with a group of hard-hat wearing tool-pushers from Texas simply because they do not identify with him. They will respond much better to someone who can talk to them on their terms, using anecdotes that relate to their experiences.

Probably the most predominant deficiency of safety videos and CBTs is their inability to answer questions. They rarely go back over information if someone missed it. The will not stop to explain a concept if one person in the room is unclear (at best, a CBT will let you repeat the same information, with no further explanation). Remember, some people you train may not understand the terminology, or may not read well, or may not think as fast as the person who created the video or computer module. Your job in safety training is to make sure that one way or another, EVERY student gets the benefit of comprehending all the information as it applies to him or her. Keeping them alive is your job. Letting the info run them over like a runaway forklift is a sure way to guarantee that the first actual runaway forklift they encounter will, in fact, literally run them over too.

And if the safety regulations change slightly, your video is now out of date. Now you have to buy a new tape or train your people on the wrong things until you do. Not a very fluid and effective way to adjust to a changing work environment.

Common Sense is All it Takes

There are plenty of areas in every business that could use some automation, streamlining, and general cost- and corner-cutting. However, (and this is a subject near and dear to our hearts for those of us who engage in the forklift safety training business) there are certain things worth the extra time and effort. Safety training should be at the top of that list. Forklifts are dangerous, quirky beasts. Almost 1 IN EVERY 6 workplace accidents (that includes slipping on spilled coffee and stapling one's hand to a bulletin board) involves a forklift. 1 in 4 of all workplace accidents occurs in a loading area. Someone gets hurt by one of these machines every 11 minutes and dies because of one every 3 days in the U.S. alone. Do you want to put such a potentially dangerous tool in the hands of someone you've trained with the quick and cheap option?

Don't misunderstand, videos do teach. Some are well-made and worth ADDING to your tool bag. CBT's go a step further and allow some degree of interaction, and can help your test students as you go. But as stand-alones, they're still a ticking bomb, and when a bomb goes off, you, as the safety manager, are going to get hit with a great deal of the shrapnel. So let's cut corners and use quick training methods on purchasing systems and new word processing software (which have much lower fatality rates), and keep a human being teaching human beings how to stay alive.