While attending the Offshore Technology Conference, I heard a speaker make the point that studies substantiate that employees who are trained in safety are involved in fewer accidents.  Those of us who promote and provide training in safety, this comes as no surprise.  But it was his next point which I found so interesting: “that it is more than the fact that the employee was trained, but that a company willing to invest in safety training was more likely to have established a better safety culture.” 

Because I am in the process of developing a training course on the application of Safety Standards (IEC 61508/61511) in Upstream O&G, this particularly resonated.  I began a mental list of the reasons why a company chooses to send an employee to safety training: 

1. Their employee gains personal knowledge of the subject matter and brings that knowledge back to the organization.
2. It’s an investment in improving their employees’ level of talent and expertise.
3. It tells their employees that safety is important.

When you come down to it, it’s the company telling its people that it is worth the company’s time and money to learn about safety; that the individual and all those that he or she teaches are worth it.  And so, the corporate culture of safety is reinforced or developed as the case may be.  That is a corporate culture worth promoting, worth investing in – a corporate message of safety; to that individual trained in safety, to those co-workers who, in turn, receive the benefit of his training.  That investment, more than any slogan sends the message that you, the individual, you, the employee, are worth keeping safe.