When I enlisted in the U.S. Army, I wasn’t just issued a uniform and weapon then deployed. I was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for eight weeks of basic training.
In addition to weaponry training, my drill sergeants taught me the absolute need for command, control, communications and movement on the battlefield—just like your people should be trained to respond to an emergency in your workplace.
Since the time of Alexander the Great, military leaders have understood the universal law that saves lives: People respond the way they were trained, and untrained people freeze.
When soldiers, police, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, airline pilots or your employees have to make rapid decisions in emergency conditions, their training kicks in.
First, of course, you need to have a plan for responding to all foreseeable emergencies at your workplace.
Your Emergency Action Plan should at least address:
- Active shooter
- Fire
- Medical emergency
- Toxic spill
- Tornado or severe weather
- Earthquake or other natural disaster
Great plans are a smart thing. Yet your plan will be useless without training your people. If you don’t get the words off the page and into your employees’ heads, you’ve failed them operationally and legally.
Emergency Insight: Your untrained people can’t rise to the occasion. They sink to their level of training.
Training is not only smart, it’s required by federal law.
Consider:
- OSHA requires that every workplace in the United States—without exception—shall train all employees in emergency response annually and at hire. OSHA’s position: “Your first day on the job should not be your last day on earth.”
- OSHA requires that training shall be in a classroom with a “qualified” trainer—by dint of training or experience.
- The law requires that planning and training be site-specific.
- On-screen training can supplement. But, it can never substitute for the annual classroom training. By definition, on-screen training does not comply operationally or legally.
- On-screen training may be helpful for an individual. But, if the classroom training is not ubiquitous to all employees, the employer has failed.
- By definition and by law, training is based on and aimed at a written plan of site-specific emergency response procedures. The sequencing shall be PLAN, TRAIN, DRILL, EXERCISE. So, training some employees, on-screen re: the Active Shooter Protocol is counter-productive and arguably dangerous.
National research reports that 85% of your employees believe safety at your workplace is their most important issue—by far, more important than raises, salary and benefits.
I’ve trained more than 36,000 employees like yours over the last 18 years. Our anonymous and confidential surveys show that 98.5% said they felt confident they could respond successfully after having been trained.
Frequent employee comments include, “This is fantastic that management did this for us,” “Can we do this more than once a year?” and “I can use this in my personal life.”
I’m so confident about employee training that I make this promise to our clients:
Give me your employees for three hours, and I’ll give you back employees who can respond to any emergency.
And I have the research to prove it.
Contact us to learn how we can train your people how to respond and react to your foreseeable emergencies.
Call 203 563 9999 or email me at BoMitchell@911Consulting.net.