Some of the often most dreaded words received by today’s safety professionals and line managers: “Here comes another great safety program from headquarters that will help us improve our performance. . .”
It’s surely not because we don’t welcome progress, and it’s definitely not because we don’t want to see improvement in our performance. Who can argue with either of these worthy objectives? More often than not, that dread is rooted in one or more (or a combination of) the following reasons.
- The organization is still busy working on deploying the last program that rolled out.
- The last program hasn’t been in place long enough for us to experience or realize its benefit(s).
- Our limited resources are ‘tapped-out’ supporting other, ongoing, effective programs.
- The organization is battling against ‘initiative overload’ and / or the ‘flavor of the month’ syndrome. Another program simply will be viewed as more of the same.
- The programs currently in place have delivered great results. They only need to be updated and / or refreshed versus being replaced by or supplemented by new programs.
Visual Literacy is NOT another safety program! The Visual Literacy concepts, skills, and tools offered by COVE serve to enhance, update, and refresh the safety programs (tools, processes, practices, systems) your organization is currently employing. The integration of Visual Literacy (VL) into your existing safety programs can make them even more effective.
- When leaders and safety professionals understand and apply VL principles, they not only ‘learn to see’ better themselves, but they understand how and why their workers ‘see’ (or not), and can apply that knowledge to program and facility design.
- When people in the organization ‘learn to see’ more effectively, their hazard perception/awareness/recognition programs and risk management processes can be even more effective.
- When incident/near miss investigation teams apply VL principles, they are better equipped to ‘see’ important data/information relative to the incident, to interpret that information and to communicate what that information means – ultimately leading to more effective follow-up actions and solutions.
- Individuals who are more skilled at ‘seeing’ can be more effective observers and communicators during behavior-based safety activities, safety audits, workplace walk-abouts – or while they are simply walking through the workplace.
The unique experiences offered by COVE not only provide a means to enhance your safety toolkit, but they are actually quite fun! COVE applies the tools and principles of Visual Literacy that have long been employed in the art world in a unique and distinctive way to your workplace and to the safety world. Past participants have nearly all shared with us how much fun they had during a workshop; how it was such a new, engaging, and eye-opening experience. When was the last time you heard that kind of description applied to ‘safety training’?
So, come ‘see’ for yourself! Let COVE show you how you can utilize engaging, unique experiences and training to enhance, refresh, and improve your current suite of safety programs.
