It’s great for workplaces to have all these fresh faces and all that youthful energy and ideas. However, with the pluses come the minuses that result from teens’ lack of work experience.
Incorporate the good without the bad by training your new teenage employees in all safety measures.
To help you with this critical training, the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE), the National Institutes of Safety and Health (NIOSH), and the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration ( Oregon OSHA) have teamed up to provide training resources. Visit asse.org/teensafety for training presentations, quizzes, handouts, and other useful materials.
Think you have no time to train? Think again. BLR’s 7-Minute Safety Trainer helps you fulfill key OSHA-required training tasks in as little as 7 minutes. Try it at no cost and see!
Oregon OSHA (orosha.org/pdf/pubs/s917.pdf ) gives a good explanation of the risk factors for teen workers. These factors include:
- Lack of on-the-job experience, including knowing the risks associated with each job, including:
- Physical hazards
- Biological hazards
- Chemical hazards
- Other hazards (noise, vibration, radiation, etc.)
- Feeling of invincibility that may lead to risk-taking
- Lack of awareness of their rights and responsibilities, as well as job tasks that are illegal for them to perform
- Trouble in relating cause and effect so that they don’t see how an injury today could disable them for life
- Desire to prove themselves that can lead them to do unsafe things
- Reluctance to ask questions
In addition to these factors, teens need to be trained on how to identify hazards because:
- They may think that their employers have protected them, so they don’t have personal responsibilities for staying safe; and
- They may not know where to find safety information, such as for hazardous chemicals.
Adapt this valuable multistep process from Oregon OSHA to train your teen employees. Customize the following steps to your young workforce and your specific workplace:
- Give teens clear instructions on the safety precautions to take for each task.
- Ask teens to repeat your instructions and to ask questions whenever they don’t understand.
- Demonstrate—or have an older employee demonstrate—how to perform each task.
- Watch teens as they perform each task and correct mistakes until they get it right.
- Ask once more if they have any more questions.
- Check back later to ensure that they’re continuing to perform their tasks correctly and safely.
Effective, 7-minute sessions provide comprehensive safety training at an average cost of $1 a day. Get the details.
Effective Safety Training in Just 7 Minutes!
To help train employees of all ages on a broad range of safety and health topics, savvy safety professionals have relied on BLR’s 7-Minute Safety Trainer for years. This essential training resource allows you to provide concise, memorable training easily and effectively in just a few minutes. Materials are ready to use, and each session supplies a detailed trainer’s outline, as well as a handout, quiz, and quiz answers, to get your points across quickly—and cost-effectively.
All told, this “trainer’s bible” contains 50 prewritten meetings covering almost every aspect of safety you would want or need to train on, in a format designed to be taught in as little as 7 minutes each. All of them are perfect for getting new employees off to a safe start, as well as keeping veteran workers alert and up to date on all your safety concerns.
Major topics in the 7-Minute Safety Trainer include:
—Confined spaces
—Electrical safety
—Fire safety and emergency response
—HazCom
—Machine guarding and lockout/tagout
—Material handling
—PPE use and care
—Housekeeping/slips, trips, and falls
—And dozens more
Download Table of Contents
Download Sample Safety Meeting
Just make as many copies as you need of the included handouts and quizzes, and you’re ready to train.
Equally important is that the program ships new meetings every quarter to respond to new and changed regulations. This service is included in the program price, which averages just over $1 a working day. In fact, this is one of BLR’s most popular safety programs.
If you’d like to personally evaluate 7-Minute Safety Trainer and see how it can build safety awareness, we’ll be happy to send it to you for 30 days on a no-cost, no-obligation trial basis. Just let us know and we’ll arrange it.