Energizing Training & Compliance Pedagogy

IMAGINE THIS SITUATION A CLIENT FOUND THEMSELVES IN: 

Your grassroots crew members labor in a physically demanding, technically complex, and potentially dangerous working environment. Nevertheless, for years they have led the industry in terms of engagement in the business, safety performance, and going the extra mile to help establish the brand. You compete in an industry where compliance with rigorous federal agency oversight and paperwork is critical every day. But safety and compliance incidents are now on the rise. There is in fact more and more evidence that your once vaunted recurrent training infrastructure has become more of a “box-checking” exercise than a substantive continuous learning process. Meanwhile, supervisors report that a “punch-in and punch-out” attitude is slowly replacing the “engaged and empowered” culture that had characterized the facility’s grassroots workforce for decades. Not surprisingly as these trends begin to become apparent locally and company-wide, increasing pressures are simultaneously emerging at the grassroots for crew members to organize into union representation -- which leadership knows will drastically alter the collaborative working environment the company has staked its future on. 

The Challenge: We were given the challenge in this key facility to re-energize the “continuous learning culture” at the grassroots of the enterprise. We sought a plan to transform the recurrent safety and compliance training regimen into a positive aspect of professional and personal growth for crew members instead of just a quarterly “box-checking” exercise. We were also given the additional challenge of seeing if a broader inspiration of learning culture in the facility could emerge as a key tool in strengthening the direct relationship between management and the grassroots. 

The Solution:  Progressiventures designed a new pedagogy for grassroots recurrent safety and compliance training which emphasized open collaboration between local work teams during the process instead of only requiring self-directed (corporate designed) e-learning. In addition to inspiring a more accountable process guiding individual completion of E-learning portals, we created a series of shift-workshops for each key topic (held in conjunction with the e-learning module deadline for that topic) at which crewmembers would use their own language to digest and discuss the topic based on their local reality, share stories of success and improvement in the area, and work on next steps relevant to local facility improvement. We also initiated a feedback mechanism in which we compiled real-time crew-member analyses of the issue for each safety or compliance learning topic (based on the results of the shift workshops) and sent these reports “up the chain” to corporate managers assigned in these areas. 

The Result: The facility reported improved safety performance on-the-ground as well as more rigorous regulatory consciousness -- along with 100 percent compliance to documentation standards. More importantly, the professionalism of the workforce soared. Even the break room culture changed. More and more managers reported being welcomed into ongoing group conversations increasingly occurring about the finer points of key procedures or safety measures. Corporate managers did indeed notice and respond to the analyses being sent by the crew members and were regularly using the work to improve corporate protocols and training language. Overall, a culture of continuous improvement was taking hold in a facility where morale and engagement had been ebbing for years.

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