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Transforming Safety Training for Grain and Feed Industries
9 Plays1 year ago
Steven Kilger, the host of the Feed & Grain Podcast, interviews Joe Mlynek, a content creation expert and partner at Safety Made Simple. They discuss digital safety and education in the grain and feed industries. Safety Made Simple is a company that provides safety programming and online safety training for various agri-businesses, including grain and feed industries. They offer a wide range of courses in English and Spanish, catering to different types and sizes of facilities.
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Transcript
Introduction to Feeding Grain Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Feeding Grain podcast. And thank you so much for listening. My name is Stephen Kilgore. I'm the managing editor at Feeding Grain and your host on the podcast today.
Guest Introduction: Joe Milnick
00:00:11
Speaker
We have a great show, Joe Milnick, content creation expert and partner at Safety Made Simple, stopped by to talk about digital safety education.
What is Safety Made Simple?
00:00:19
Speaker
Safety Made Simple creates safety programming specifically for the grain and feed industries, along with other agribusinesses.
00:00:26
Speaker
And we talk about how online safety training has evolved to become more engaging and interactive and also helps managers track and organize their safety training program. But before we get into that, if you're listening on a podcast with a podcast app, please consider subscribing. And if able to leave a review, it really helps us out. Thank you again for listening to our conversation with Joe.
Joe's Journey in Safety
00:00:49
Speaker
Hi, Joe. Thanks so much for talking to me today. You're very welcome, Steve. Thanks for having me.
00:00:54
Speaker
Can you tell me and our listeners a little bit more about yourself? I've been in safety for almost 30 years. I started many years ago as an intern for a large agribusiness company. And I actually was doing environmental work.
00:01:12
Speaker
and gravitated toward safety. So I moved into the automotive industry for three years, worked as a safety coordinator in automotive plant. And then I came back to the company that I did an internship for and spent 10 years in corporate safety.
00:01:29
Speaker
And then in 2009, I started my own consulting business, progressive safety services. And in 2014, I kind of joined forces with Chuck Piri. He was a consultant out of the Kansas city area, did a lot of work in cattle feeding as a consultant. And we started safety made simple and particularly our focus and reach into the grain handling industry.
Founding of Safety Made Simple
00:01:53
Speaker
Yeah, the safety made is simple. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? Because I think you have a great way to facilitate safety training, which can be hard to do in our industry since we're so spread out, especially for independent mills and things that just don't have the staff to really have a safety person there.
00:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, we, we started in 2014 to develop grain specific safety training. And since then we've expanded into agronomy and food safety and equipment maintenance. And we really have an offering for just about any type of facility out there. So just off the top of my head, I'm thinking about some of our partners we've got.
00:02:33
Speaker
Grain elevators, agronomy centers, feed mills, flower mills, large and small farms, service providers, construction companies, feed yards. The list goes on and on.
Course Offerings and Model
00:02:45
Speaker
And our clients are anywhere in size from a small company with six employees all the way up to cooperatives with thousands of employees. So we've kind of run the full gamut. We have about 150 online courses. They're all 15 to 20 minutes in length.
00:03:01
Speaker
We provide them in both English and Spanish. And I think what kind of makes us unique is we have a subject matter expert team that's kind of second to none. They're all industry professionals, most with over 20 years of experience in the ag world. Well, you touched on a little bit, but like, what are some of the key features you guys do primarily online safety training? When you log into your site, is it a subscription? How does that work?
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, subscription based. So we parade in our part, we call them partners. Other people call them clients. We truly believe that we partner with companies to help send their people
Tracking and Reporting Features
00:03:38
Speaker
home safely. We offer a subscription that's based on bundles of courses. So you can get 12 courses, 24, 36, all the way up to a hundred or our full catalog of 150.
00:03:50
Speaker
And we often as well will create several different courses on the same topic so that each year people can kind of switch things in and out so things are fresh. So that's kind of how we work. We offer that through a learning, what's called a learning management system, which I think more and more companies are taking advantage of these systems that allow you to really easily assign and track employee training online.
00:04:15
Speaker
and also run reports and generate reports and customize reports and really see the status of anybody's training or their training records that, you know, with a couple clicks of a mouse. So it's a really efficient system and our system also allows our partners to build
00:04:32
Speaker
their own content within our system. So if they want to build courses that are specific to their operations, they can do that within our system as well. They can upload videos and PowerPoints and a whole gamut of different things that they can do.
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's really
Overcoming Language Barriers
00:04:47
Speaker
cool. And you mentioned that your courses come in multiple languages, Spanish being the other one, which is a really big deal because from what I've heard from a lot of safety guys at facilities, that's that language barrier can be, it can be a big deal. So it's nice that you're accommodating for that. It's become more of a, more of, I'm not going to say an issue, more of a challenge for people in the ag world as time goes on. We're, we're seeing a lot of Spanish speaking employees.
00:05:17
Speaker
And usually we just, when we started, we saw a lot of that in Texas and some of the Southern states, but we're seeing more and more of it, not only just in ag facilities, but also on the construction side as well. And it's very important for companies. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration really expects that a company or requires that a company deliver training in a language that an employee can easily understand.
Making Courses Accessible
00:05:43
Speaker
And there's a couple different ways to look at that. The first would be their native language. So if you have Spanish speaking employees, obviously having courses in Spanish is a benefit. But it goes a little bit beyond that as well. And you also look at how, and we're really good at this, is we kind of, we have anybody from college graduates to people that didn't go to high school taking our courses. So we kind of hit it right in the middle.
00:06:06
Speaker
Not to get too fancy with the words, try to be confusing or anything like that, but really be really clear and concise and simple in our message to the end user or what we call our learners.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah. How do you guys keep things interesting?
Engagement Strategies
00:06:21
Speaker
You mentioned the kind of the 20 minute, roughly video language. I mean, I think it's perfect. It's always terrible when you get into a training and it's an hour and a half long, but is that part of it? What else do you do to kind of keep people engaged and make sure that they're actually taking in the information?
00:06:42
Speaker
The challenge with any training, whether it's classroom training or in an online format is keeping employees engaged. So we have a number of techniques that we use. Now, some people sometimes refer to online training as videos and as somebody that helps develop these, that they're anything but a video. A video is something that press play and you hope that somebody pays attention.
00:07:06
Speaker
With an online course, and we're really fortunate, we have an instructional designer and a learning expert. Her name's Peggy Palmer, and she's developed courses for Fortune 100 and 500 companies. Very good at what she does, just thrilled to have her. But there's a number of techniques and strategies that she uses within a course to keep people engaged. I don't think, Steve, that a minute or two will go by in a course where somebody doesn't have to interact with it.
00:07:36
Speaker
So some of the techniques that she'll use is she uses characters is one thing that we do. So each one of our courses has a case study of an employee. They either did something right or maybe made the wrong decision and something good or something bad happened to them. So we use a lot of characters and that really allows people to interact and it allows us to drive our content home as well. So we use characters throughout the courses and these case studies.
00:08:06
Speaker
We'll also use what we call thought questions. They're just an engaging way to get learners to think about the whys behind the information that we're giving them and ask them to answer something. And then we'll have various exercises throughout courses, things like drop and drag and drop, matching exercises, those types of things.
00:08:25
Speaker
And then whenever we ask questions, some of the other things that we do is just to provide what we call remediation or feedback at the end of the activity to just increase that retention. So if we ask a question, we tell them, you know, why that's true or why that's false. So just really reemphasizing.
00:08:42
Speaker
The courses continue to get more and more interactive. I just was working on an update that we did this morning, and it never ceases to amaze me how Peggy continues to just be able to use new strategies and ways of keeping people engaged with the program to get through it. So it's not something, like I said earlier, like a video that you can just press play and kind of tune out. You really have to be engaged with the program.
00:09:09
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's a good point. Cause I guess a video is kind of the old fashioned way of doing things. And I've noticed even in my own training for us, it's, you know, cybersecurity and things like that. It is much more interactive than it used to be when I started my career. And that seems good because I don't know about other people, but for me, I'd usually turn on the video and one, you know, tab in my browser for all the way to do other work. And as it plays in the background, which isn't what you want.
00:09:34
Speaker
So how do you measure the effectiveness of your online training
Assessing Training Effectiveness
00:09:38
Speaker
program? You mentioned how you're always evolving it. What steps do you do to continuously improve the content and get feedback from those that are taking
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, we stay really in tune with our partners. There's actually somebody on our team at Safety Made Simple that is continually monitoring their progress and their course completion rates and those types of things to see how we can help them. One of the ways I measure is when I'm out in the field and I still do a little bit of consulting work out there, Steve.
00:10:09
Speaker
I'll ask people questions that I know are in their training when I'm out in the field and people get them right. And somebody's teaching them that and a lot of instances that's what we're doing. You know, the staff I work with on our content development team has really just taken everything that we've used. We were all classroom trainers at one time and put them into an online format. So we do a lot of informal time engagement as well. And I get good feedback. Like I had a safety director one time say that
00:10:37
Speaker
An employee exited a grain elevator because he smelled this odor of dead fish. And he says, I think the employee said, I think it was, it was phosphine in there. So we took a monitor and the monitor indicated there were phosphine levels and he goes, well, how did it, how did you know it smelled like dead fish? And he goes, well, we took that safety made simple class on hazards of fumigation. So you get feedback like that. But as far as the continuous improvement piece, it's not really hard for us. The team I work with.
00:11:07
Speaker
I think we're pretty blessed. They're never really overly impressed by themselves. They don't sit back and go, hey, look at we did or look how good we are. It's always what can we do to get better? So we have a continual effort to update our existing programs. We know like, you know, we were just talking about videos. A lot of companies out there have been using the same video for five to 10 years.
00:11:33
Speaker
And you get that feedback. I have been watching the same video and I don't want that to happen for our partners. So we are constantly updating our courses. And when we update, it's, it comes out looking like a completely different course from the version that we created, you know, several years ago. So, and we're, we're committed to that. So we do at least one new update per month.
00:11:57
Speaker
And then we also develop one new course per month. Now, a lot of these courses come from feedback. We do a survey usually around the end of summer to start our plan for the upcoming year. And a lot of our courses come from feedback of the partners that we have. And as I mentioned earlier,
00:12:17
Speaker
with Peggy Pullman and she's really makes all of this happen in the background and packages all this up. She's kind of a self-proclaimed online training nerd and she tells me, you know, she's always on the different webinars and attending conferences and those types of things, really to make sure that we stay up with the latest trends and the tools that are out there.
00:12:39
Speaker
So each time I see a new course come across my screen for review and I have to, a lot of them I'm involved in the actual development, but I actually approve all of them. There's always something new in there, a new twist that she's tried, a new strategy to engage learners. And we kind of know just from, we want to make sure that we keep things fresh for our partners, but we also from a business standpoint, know that if we stand still for a minute, that one of our competitors will run right by us.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, you're obviously probably more much more aware of this than I am but with OSHA regulations and things like that, a big part of it is always will training your employees, and then making sure to keep records of those training so you can then show them to an inspector.
Compliance and Training Tracking
00:13:25
Speaker
How does your kind of training program comply with those relevant regulations and standards that so to make sure everything all the safety procedures are up to OSHA code and guidelines and then what resources do you provide to kind of help employers keep track of all that and make sure that the right employees are getting the right or the right training.
00:13:47
Speaker
I'll talk about the tracking part first. So the learning management system that we have makes it really easy for an administrator and you can have multiple administrators within the same organization to assign courses to their employees. We provide a compliance training matrix that's based off of OSHA, EPA, DOT, that gives them a little bit of help with that. And some need help in other larger companies we have that are full safety team
00:14:15
Speaker
don't need as much help with that, but that's just a resource. Once an employee is assigned, you can assign employees courses individually or even by group. So a group would be like a maybe a facility or type of facility, or even job classifications, maintenance or truck drivers or whatever it is. Once they enter a course, they're gonna be asked at the end to pass a 10 question quiz. It's usually three or four multiple choice, six or seven true false.
00:14:43
Speaker
It, everything in the quiz will really link back to what they learned throughout the course. And these are key things we want them to understand from a compliance standpoint, and more importantly, just from a safety standpoint. So the company has the ability to really establish the passing score for those, those tests. And it's usually, you can set it at a hundred percent, theoretically, if you wanted. Default is 80%. Once they pass that course, their training records are all kept within the system.
00:15:12
Speaker
So I can easily as an administrator run a report for an employee on his employee training history. And I can also run that for a facility as well. There's other reporting functions that allow you to kind of develop your own custom reports.
00:15:27
Speaker
And the system will actually email them to whoever you want them to go through at a certain day in a certain time. So it really allows people to keep track of it. As far as the OSHA compliance piece and some of the regulatory, myself and others on the content team, we develop the courses based on regulations. Most of our courses, some of them are best practice things like near miss reporting.
00:15:51
Speaker
hazard analysis and that kind of thing. But those types of courses teach people the basis of safety. But we do have these compliance topics. I would tell you that we stay away from within our courses focusing too much on references to regulations and ocean DOT. When it's important, we put that in there. But at the end of the day, we want people to understand the hazards in the work area and what's required of them or what practices they can implement to get themselves home at the end of the day.
00:16:22
Speaker
So we have, you know, kind of a technique. I've always said, I don't want the people taking our courses. Our goal isn't to make them a safety professional or a compliance professional. It's to get them home safely at the end of the day. That's truly what our mission is. So with that said, I would say that we've on multiple occasions had some of our partners receive citations, unfortunately, from maybe it's OSHA.
00:16:47
Speaker
as part of their follow-up or in their meetings with OSHA and informal conferences and things of that nature. OSHA sometimes will request copies of training. And we've had, what we'll do is provide them a narration document of one of our courses so they can see what was included in that course. And they're usually, we base them off of the training requirements that are really given to us by OSHA. On multiple occasions, they've always accepted and said, yeah, these employees were properly trained.
00:17:16
Speaker
We even had one company that was cited for lockout tag out that they actually, OSHA had cited them for not adequately training their employees. We showed them our course and then the training records for the employees at that facility and they dropped the citation. So we do keep the compliance thing in the back of our mind. I think, Steve, you know, the other question is what are some of the other things that we provide to our partners to help them stay current and educate their employees?
00:17:45
Speaker
And a lot of these things aren't limited to just our partners. We do a tremendous amount of outreach through the year as well. We have a newsletter that goes out monthly. It's called the Safety Scoop. Just to interject, I do get, and it is very good. So people should sign up for it. Yeah. And you can sign up on our website. It's www.safetymadessimple.com. We do, generally we'll highlight if there's any national or local emphasis plans from OSHA, those types of things.
00:18:13
Speaker
We have an is it safe feature that's really popular in there. And that comes a lot of the pictures we use in the is it safe feature may come from our partners or may come from myself when I'm out in the field, those types of things. So I know a lot of people use those in their own training. A lot of people use that and cut and paste that in our course builder course and send it out to everybody to kind of take a look at.
00:18:34
Speaker
So we have a newsletter within the newsletter as well. We release what we call take five safety talk. It's a toolbox talk. So we release one of those every month. Anybody that gets our newsletter can take that PDF and download it and send it out. For our partners, we actually have a library of those. I think we're somewhere around 80 of these toolbox talks that they have access to that they can grab at any particular point. We also do quarterly outreach videos. So.
00:19:01
Speaker
They're short, usually two to three minutes on some topics. I've got one coming out in June. That's a line of fire incidents. And we'll get those out to our email distribution lists, which is thousands of people throughout, throughout the ag world. We do a video series for the grain safety standup that's brought to you by OSHA and NGFA and Jeeps and the Grain Handling Safety Council and those types of things, where we'll talk about things that impact
00:19:28
Speaker
grain elevators. And then I also do what we call the safety simplified blog. We're sending that out monthly to everybody on our mailing list as well, where we kind of balance our messages in there on compliance topics and also just things we think are best practices for folks out there in the industry.
00:19:47
Speaker
Well, that's really cool. I really like your focus on best practices because like you stated, people aren't, you shouldn't be doing this because they want to comply with the government. They should be doing it because it's going to keep them safe and keep them going home at night, which is what the goal is for everybody.
00:20:06
Speaker
Right. Compliance is kind of funny. When I started in the safety world, I worked for my boss, the safety director at the time said he didn't focus a lot. We talked about regulations occasionally, but his philosophy was if we do the best for the employee and try to make the safest work environment possible, most of the time we'll be in compliance. And he said, and at the very least we'll have a really good argument.
00:20:30
Speaker
And I think spot on. That's a really good philosophy for I think safety in general. So do you have any success stories, any companies that come to mind that really saw kind of big measurable improvements in their safety programs, their outcomes, employee engagement, any of that kind of thing?
Success Stories
00:20:50
Speaker
There's two of them that come to mind and I'm sure there's more, but the two that come to mind, the first one is
00:20:57
Speaker
A mid-sized grain company, maybe 150 employees, maybe nine or 10 locations, they had no real formal safety training program prior to using Safety Made Simple. I think they did give some materials to their managers or supervisor and ask them to cover them with their employees. That's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. What I run into a lot of times is supervisors and managers, some of them are
00:21:24
Speaker
really good trainers. They're just not comfortable in front of a group or sometimes just don't have the knowledge that somebody with a safety background and that's no fault of theirs at all. Anyway, with this company, they went with Safety Made Simple and with them a few years. They're part of a captive insurance group and the captive insurance group is made up of a lot of different types of ag facilities. It could be commercial farms and grain elevators and flour mills and all that kind of thing.
00:21:49
Speaker
And they were awarded, I think it's called the gold award by the captive for the best safety performance. Now, safety performance, as far as like injuries and those types of things was a component of it. Training was a component, inspections, all those types of things. But they were quick to give us a pat on the back saying that we made an impact at their company. So.
00:22:10
Speaker
That was one don't have a lot of hard data there, but we feel and I think they feel that we had an impact and they're receiving that award. I do know we have a partner in Minnesota who's a full service cooperative, their grain agronomianic energy somewhere around 350 employees.
00:22:28
Speaker
Now they saw a dramatic increase in their first three years with Safety Made Simple. So from like year one to year three, their lost time injuries decreased by 75%. Total lost workdays were around the same and their total recordable incident rate went down by about
00:22:48
Speaker
somewhere around 40%. So we recognize that we were just part of that effort. I'm sure there were other things that they did. But again, they were very quick to provide us with those numbers saying, hey, that we think this was a contributing factor. So we have had a lot of success with that. But we also recognize as well that they had to do a lot of the work with some other strategies as well.
00:23:10
Speaker
your crucial step in building a safety culture though, which is what's important. So now I'm going to ask you the hardest question. So let's say you're listening to this and you're interested, what should people do? They want to get in contact with you and maybe discuss a little bit more about what safety made simple has to offer.
Contact Information
00:23:27
Speaker
Sure. I'll give them two avenues. One, our website is www.safetymadesimple.com. There are several ways on there to contact us and probably a little sticky will pop up when you go to the site and ask you if you'd like more information.
00:23:42
Speaker
The second would be just to feel free to email me out. It's a really simple email. I don't have my last name in it. So it's joe at safetymadesimple.com and just email me. And if you're interested in some further information, we can provide that to you or if we can just chat on the phone for a few minutes as well, but we're always always available.
00:24:02
Speaker
Well, that's great. Thank you so much, Joe, for speaking to me today and tell me and the listeners what you do. All of your website and all that will be linked in the show notes. Thank you everyone out there for listening. Stay safe out there. Thank you, Steve.