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“It’s impossible for me to this because….”

“There’s no way I can do it that way”

“It’s difficult for me to do it that way because…”

“If I did it that way, ____ would happen”

If you’ve heard statements similar to these it’s probably because your employees have obstacles or barriers in their way of performing and doing things the way they’ve been trained or instructed.  In this final blog series I’m going to discuss how to approach obstacles and barriers that get in the way of employees doing what they’ve been trained to do.

Continuing on with my blog series on the four common reasons why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained, I’m going to take a closer look at perception.  The scenario I’m going to use as the basis for this is one which is occurring in many hospitals and long term care facilities around the country:  caregivers not using safe patient handling (SPH) equipment to move patients.  This has become a source of frustration for many SPH program leaders.  As you will see, the lack of SPH equipment use could easily involve all 4 reasons but for this blog we’ll focus only on perception.

In my last four blogs I’ve discussed four common reasons that contribute to why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained and know to do:  habits, perceptions, obstacles and barriers.  Before we can address them we obviously need to determine the root cause.  We need to know the answers to these questions:

The last of the four common reasons for why employees don’t do what they’ve been trained to do are barriers.  Think of barriers as a thick and high brick wall.  There is no way for a worker to do what you’ve told them because a wall is in their way.  The workers lack the equipment and tools or authority to they need to do their job as they’ve told.  Barriers must be addressed and removed as soon as possible as they prevent the ability to perform the task, perform the task safety and/or take safety precautions that control their and their coworkers’ exposure to risk.

I’m going to continue my blog series about why employees who’ve received safety and/or ergonomics training still don’t do the things they were trained to do.  It’s been my experience that there are at least four main reasons for people not to follow through on what they’ve been taught.  In my last blog I talked about habits.  Today, I’m going to cover the second common reason:  perceptions.  Perception means the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.