Safety and health pros have been known as teachers, among many roles, for decades and decades. But it’s a touchy subject and the role doesn’t get the attention it serves. Why? It implies that employees are students, which to an extent they are, always learning new aspects of safety and health practices. But employees are grown adults and it is denigrating to discount their years of experience, lessons learned over the years, and their ideas and solutions to many frontline hazards. Employees know best where the next incident is likely to occur. They are not fresh-off-the-street kids.
Let’s focus on the role of teacher that most safety and health professionals assume or are assigned as part of the job. The most obvious example of this teaching role is training. Professionals spend a good bit of their time bringing in employees for compliance training, annual hazcom training mandates and the like. There is also training on company safety and health rules, behavioral observations and feedback, identifying hazards and assessing the degree of risk involved, participating in incident analyses and getting at the root causes, how to work effectively as teams, if you see something say something, reporting protocols, building cultures and disciplinary procedures to name a few but certainly not all the training topics.