Creative Senior Manager for Deployments & Customer Care | Expert in Robotics Deployment & IT Customer Service | Proven Experience in Education, Corporate, Healthcare, & Food Service Sectors
Man, this brings me back. Early in my career, I was promoted to the safety team at a glass plant and volunteered to become the Forklift Certification Instructor. I got my training, aced it, and then had to do the recertification to a room full of operators that had been driving longer than I had been alive. Intimidating? Yes. How did I survive? 1) Acknowledge their knowledge. Make sure they know that you know that they know their stuff. 2) Remind them why we're there. It's not to say "You don't know what you're doing" it's to say, "Job #1 is keeping everyone safe. I care about the team, you care about the team, the fact that I'm here means the company cares about the team." 3) Use concrete examples from the location if possible, from other sites if not. You need to make it real. Not to scare people, but to show that rules / SOP's are there for a reason, not because someone behind a desk just made it up. Finally, most corporate trainers will hate this but: 4) "If they're making fun of the rule, they know the rule." Don't take it personally, don't worry, don't get upset if they're cracking jokes, etc. The time to worry is if everyone is checked out, or ignoring you completely. Make all the jokes you want about wearing PPE, as long as you do it while wearing your PPE. :)
Some helpful tips from our Safety Manager, Eric Yensan, for the 11th Annual National Forklift Safety Day! Stay safe out there (unlike our poor account manager, Kevin Hoffman).
