Safety Awakening – “What If Your Audience Knows More Than You?”
March 20, 2015 No Comments“What If Your Audience Knows More Than You?”
Early in my safety career I lived in Dubuque Iowa. As a young safety consultant I was frequently asked to speak to groups of employees about various safety subjects.
One of my clients was a trucking company. An analysis of their vehicular accidents found that their most frequent accident was right hand turns. The company’s CEO asked me to speak to all of his owner/operator truck drivers about this problem and what they could do to prevent right turn accidents.
After much preparation on my part, the day of this training session had arrived. I got in front of this large group of drivers and proceeded to tell them how to make a proper right turn with an 18-wheeler. I even diagramed how to “guard the corner” to prevent cars from sneaking between the right side of the truck and the curb. All was going well – or so I thought.
Partially through this well-rehearsed presentation an old, grey-haired driver in the back of the room raised his hand. He asked in a loud voice “Mr Weber” have you ever driven a truck?“. I answered “No, I had not.”. He then replied “Then why are you trying to tell us professional drivers how to make a right turn?“.
To say that I was embarrassed would be an understatement. How I finished the rest of my presentation I’ll never know. But I do recall cutting it short, which was fine with the audience because I’d lost them right after the above exchange.
I learned much from this meeting. I learned that if an audience knows more about a subject then you do, then the typical safety presentation format isn’t going to cut it.
Now, when asked to talk to a group who may know more about a subject then I, I try to follow these tips:
- don’t dress significantly better than your audience – dress like them and they’ll warm up to you
- admit that you’re not an expert on the subject
- recognize their expertise on this subject
- convince the audience that you care about them and their safety and health
- smile and use humor, the audience will like you and be less inclined to turn on you
- don’t lecture on how to do something, rather identify the problem and ask them to share their ideas on how to correct it
- review specific accidents in detail, then ask the audience to identify the root causes of these accidents and what they might do in the future to prevent them from recurring
- discuss what another company is doing to prevent a certain type of accident, ask them if that would work here