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Generational differences highlight safety lesson challenges

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Generational differences highlight safety lesson challenges

NEW ORLEANS — Send safety information in a long, straightforward memo and you alienate or bore your millennials. Put it all in an interactive, online forum and you might lose your older workers.

There’s apparently a sweet spot when it comes to communicating safety information to a multigenerational workforce, according to safety professionals weighing in on what works when a company wants to inform its workers on safety protocols and manage programs without the message getting lost in transmission.

“Training is becoming an issue with the different generational styles (because) each of us has a preferred communication style,” said Brenda Kelly, the program manager handling employee input for safety at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions L.L.C. in Aiken, South Carolina, who told a story about an older worker deleting without reading a text message from a young worker who was confirming a meeting.

Attendees crowded into conference rooms for two separate, lively sessions — one on Wednesday, another on Thursday — at the Volunteer Protection Program Participants Association’s Safety +, Integrated Safety & Health Management Systems Symposium in New Orleans to gain insight into this growing problem in the workplace.

Traditionalists, or those born in the 1920s and 1930s, like to adhere to authority and like top-down structure. Baby Boomers, born in the 1940s to 1960s, are more anti-authority, like to avoid meetings and are exiting the workforce, taking with them their knowledge, according a presentation on Thursday. Meanwhile, Generation Xers — those born in the 1970s — “work hard and play hard,” prefer face-to-face communications, and yet are more techno-literate than previous generations. And millennials, born in the 1980s and 1990s and entering the workforce in droves, are the “extremely tech savvy” multitaskers that want feedback and work-life balance and would rather see things on a computer screen than in a conference room.

In another presentation on Wednesday, Rob Hill, a self-professed baby boomer and NuStar Energy L.P. operations manager, told attendees that he’s “seen a lot of changes over the last 30 years” in safety in the energy field, mirroring that which took place in other industries.

Jackie Ednave, Mr. Hill’s colleague, ‎a health, safety and environmental coordinator at NuStar Energy and a millennial who completed her last college internship five years ago, said safety concerns are rarely an issue when a person from her generation is hired.

“We come in as millennials already expecting a safe workplace,” she said. “’It never even came across me, ‘is this a safe place to work?’ (Other generations) went through struggles and safety was implemented.”

And yet communicating safety remains an obstacle, others weighing in on the multigenerational workforce said.

Penelope Miller, a senior training specialist at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, showed a slide of a massive Venn diagram of the various generations, listing communication styles, showing some crossover.

“What is clear is that blended, active learning works well for all generations,” she said of the method adopted at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions.

Blended learning is a program in which a student or learner learns at least in part through delivery of content and instruction via digital and online media with some element of student control over time, place, path or pace, she said.

“A little stand-up and a little technology, different types of media thrown in for the same course,” Ms. Miller said. “They can learn at different speeds. They can go back (and relearn).” 

 

 

 

 

 

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