Episode 201: Learning Matters

In this episode of Leading & Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores new research from the February 2026 Journal of Applied Psychology examining how safety training contributes to workplace safety. The featured meta-analysis reviews numerous studies to evaluate the true impact of safety training on knowledge, skills, attitudes (KSA), and overall safety outcomes.

Dr. French reflects on one of the most persistent challenges in safety leadership: making regulatory training meaningful. Using hazard communication as a practical example, he discusses the difficulty of keeping repetitive, compliance-driven content engaging—especially for long-tenured employees who hear the same material year after year. Yet, he emphasizes that even “routine” safety topics remain critical, as near misses and preventable incidents continue to occur.

The research confirms what safety professionals hope to be true: safety training works. It positively influences safety knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, and ultimately workplace outcomes. Importantly, richer and more robust training efforts produce stronger results. Organizations that invest thoughtfully in safety learning—focusing on clear objectives and audience needs—see meaningful cultural and performance improvements.

However, the episode also highlights a sobering reality: some organizations still fail to provide adequate safety training, despite legal mandates and clear evidence of its effectiveness.

Dr. French concludes by reinforcing a central message—when organizations intentionally invest in knowledge, skills, and attitude development, they strengthen safety culture and business performance. Training is not just compliance; it is culture-building work.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the podcast, we're talking again about one of my absolute favorite things in that safety learning, safety training. Yeah, new research has come out, and I'm really excited to share it with you this week on the podcast. You mark,

Announcer: 0:33

welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You

Mark French: 1:33

Matt, welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So glad you joined me. I'm so excited to be a part of your podcast rotation. So this week came across an article, and of course, it's right where my passion just is on fire for safety, because it was what I focused my entire dissertation on a few years ago, more and more years ago, and I'm interested to see what has changed, or, more likely, what has not changed. So this time, I'm also in the Journal of Applied Psychology. This is the February 2026, edition. Great article, how does training contribute to workplace safety? It's a meta analysis examining the effects of safety training. Now, meta analysis, essentially is a group of researchers go out and find as many articles as they can in regards to the topic they're researching. They then have exclusion and inclusion criteria. So they go, Hey, this this article is in because of these factors, or it doesn't contain everything because of these factors. And then they have a code of data, a way of trying to pull out pieces of the work that's already been done and look at a very broad spectrum of training. In this case, they're looking for articles around training, but the meta analysis process is to look for the things that are pertinent to the research question you're asking. And so ultimately, this team of researchers is looking for how does training contribute to workplace safety? Now, I when I saw the title, I knew I right there. I was excited, because I focused on the meaningfulness of regulatory safety training, because if you've been in a leadership role, or especially in a safety role, or any type of training role where you've had to convey information to employees. It is not an easy task to create meaningful regulatory training, and most safety training is regulatory. It's based on a few things, and they explore that a little bit further. I'll touch on that later. But for for this beginning part, where I want to really, I guess, ramble about my what is interesting to me about regulatory training is that it's very repetitive. Unfortunately, it's hard to keep it fresh, because you have to repeat it year over year. There's not much change in the regulations. And I love to use the example of hazard communication, I think that is one that we have to touch on every year. We generally speaking, the hazards of the workplace. If it's a, let's call it a basic workplace, no heavy chemicals, no maybe it's a light manufacturing or assembly or warehousing, let's just say that the need for hascom is still there. You need to know what's around. You need to know where to find the Safety Data Sheets. You need to know how to read them or who to ask to help interpret them. The content stays very much the same year. Every year. And let's take an employee that's been with the company, 567, 15 more years, they're going to hear this training every year, over and over again. And yet it is very important. It is still one of the vital items that people can get hurt, they can have serious illness because of not being properly prepared for chemicals that could be in the workplace, even with simple ones, brake cleaner, gasoline, how do you label it? How do you make sure it's put away right? These are still very critical safety factors, because there's still news articles and stories of near misses and injuries that come from mislabeled chemicals. And I one of the first times it really struck me that this is real and it wasn't just like a safety training that you had to go through. Was back in my automotive days, we had a subcontractor in the plant that would basically if the seat cloth or seat leather that came from another place came in and had damages or stains or anything minor that could be worked out to make it look still brand perfect new, we would use it so they had this on site team that would look at these things, And sometimes they would need a little bit of acetone to clean certain areas or to get a grease spot out, or to fix something they needed acetone. Someone had gotten the idea that the best way to transfer the acetone in to make it to where you could, very precisely put it where you wanted in, only a little bit at a time, is they took the labels off of an eye drop bottle, like a Visine bottle. They took the labels off, didn't re label it, just left it clear and filled it full of acetone. And it was actually we were walking around and we saw them dripping this eye drop liquid onto a seat. And what are you doing? Oh, it's acetone. It cleans what it's not. Who could imagine that someone runny eyes, watery eyes? I see it sitting on the supervisor's desk. They're all good friends, hanging around like, Oh man, I'm gonna borrow his eye drops real quick. Could it happen? Yeah, unfortunately, it could happen. And then what? Suddenly we don't know what they put in their eyes. They know they're in a lot of pain, and we're trying to ask around to figure out who it was. Now, fortunately, that did not happen, but it's an example of where has come is still no matter how much we train on it is still vital. But how do you keep it interesting if you don't have these stories, or the same story gets old and you don't have new one, how do you keep meaningfulness in safety training when it's regulatory based? And on the flip side, there's also some training that's regulatory based, that needs very specific language in it. And yes, I as much respect as I have for OSHA inspectors, and I know a lot of them. I respect a lot of them. I have listened to them lecture. They've come to my talks. There are still some out there that are just a little bit too literal, or they're working a little bit too hard to find that citation, and I still remember that because the word we the person couldn't remember if they were authorized or if they were just affected. They could explain what they were, but they couldn't think of the word of what that word was, and we got to find for it. We got a citation. Now it ultimately got dropped off, but it still shows that. Okay, really, I need to focus on making sure they memorize the word authorized or affected, rather than being to explain that, hey, I don't work on equipment. I'm not the maintenance person, but I know that when they're working on it, I don't touch it. Could explain it all day long. Couldn't think of the word. And there we go with like, Okay, how detailed do we have to be in the regulatory training? And do we have to make sure that everyone memorizes what they are? So this creates such a tough issue of maintaining good safety training and creating it and making it meaningful. How do we create meaning when we know it can be exceptionally boring, when we know we're trying to force a point that really shouldn't be forced, but we're doing it because it's regulatory and we feel like we need to meet that letter of the law. There's a lot of techniques we can take, and that's where I focused, was the techniques we can take. Now I've barely even touched the article yet, but that's something we're going to do. So they look at the training overall. How does training affect workplace safety? So if you're doing training, not doing training, what kind of training? How does that impact? How does that affect your overall safety performance? Safety attitude, safety knowledge. So on the second half, as we come back after this, we're going to talk more about this article, and we're going to get into it and really look at what they found through their meta analysis that's coming up on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast.

Stinger: 10:16

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Mark French: 11:02

you welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast this week on my favorite topic of training. And so in these this article, they really are focused on what they're calling KSA training, knowledge skills, attitude. They look at these three pieces of imparting knowledge. Are we trying to give knowledge? Are we trying to teach skills? Are we trying to change attitude? And how does that go into safety training? And then what results, does it drive through that? So they look at it in two ways, internal and external, our own employees and people external to the system and the safety training we may give them training design which is really important, is this a technical training? Is it a non technical training? And does it involve safety? And then, is it regulatory focused? And this is some of the delineation they put into the research as they're coding all these articles they're looking at is the idea of regulatory versus non regulatory focused work and training. And so when they look at their of course, safety skills, safety knowledge, safety attitudes, how is it affected when we create this training? Because we want all three. We want them to have the skill to do it. We want them to have the knowledge to know what they're doing, the skill to do it, and the attitude to do it right. Ultimately, we're trying to motivate. We're in we're trying to create motivation. We're trying to create that inherent want of doing it safely. And this goes back to a lot of other research. Is why do we not do it safely, knowing that it could be very detrimental? Why would someone put themselves at risk? Well, there's a lot of factors that come into that, a lot of biases that come in that cause people to bypass safety. And ultimately, what the leading indicators they look at like, what is it creating? Is creating safe behaviors, is creating safety knowledge, and then is creating safety attitudes. And then they may say that the safety attitude is really your safety culture, the individual attitude. You group attitude together of individuals, you create culture. And so ultimately, we're trying to affect attitude to create a safety culture, and we use training to do that, and then ultimately the results of safety outcomes, and then well being and ultimate safety so as they're screening these records, ultimately, what they found is that when they found that, like internal versus external stakeholders, the internal stakeholder, the employees, it was very easy to correlate external was like this weird, fuzzy area that they needed more definition on. And that could be contractors. It even could be like someone saying, Hey, you have to train your people on certain things. And so when I think of external stakeholder, I think of being a contractor or a visitor coming to a site, and they kind of force you into learning all the safety stuff very quickly, just so they can get you in the building. And so they look at the effectiveness of this internal and external but ultimately, what they found, and thank goodness they found this. I mean, this was something that during some of my early research and continued research into safety learning, and ultimately adult learning in general, is that it does, overall, have a favorable outcome. But on the flip side, what that also tells me, and what this is, the disappointing part, is that safety training is mandated by law. If you are doing certain work, you have a certain amount of people. You're mandated by law to do safety training. And it sounds silly, but it's very pertinent that we remember this, that any safety training is better than zero, and that safety training does impact business. In this, and it does impact people in a positive way, but the indicator is that there's still a lot of organizations that aren't doing it, and that's disappointing, because that's that it's safety training is not a monstrous to do it, even at the basic level is not a significant investment. Yeah, there's some time. Yeah, there's some talk and commitment behind it. If you're going to train on it, you better be backing it up with the actions. But in this case, there are still organizations that just don't do it. Just choose, and I say it's a choice, because if you don't know, you should be doing safety training out there in the world, in in the United States to this day, I just can't believe that you don't know that. So we again, it confirms that safety training is a positive impact to a business. And when you do it right, when you really try to think about. And going back to learning models of what are you trying to do? What do you want to accomplish with this training? Who is the audience that benefits or needs this training? Those are two big questions. What do you want to get? And ultimately, how can you measure if you got it, but then who needs it, or who is required to have it? And when we look at those, and we look at that knowledge, skills, attitude, and we try to transfer that into our team, into our people, through training, then ultimately, it does create a really wonderful benefit of improvement, which is not surprising, but it's very good to continually hear that this is a well known, well documented continues to be true that when, when we invest in our people, when we invest in their Learning, when we invest in in creating their attitude when we're investing in helping them create that individual attitude for safety that ultimately builds into our safety culture as a team. That it's effective. Now, the variation of effectiveness, of course, comes through like the investment. It comes to who the audience is, and there's a lot of variables it's really hard to look at and measure, like what? How does that impact the overall effectiveness? But ultimately, what we found is that the the robust and richer the safety training, it leveraged a lot more with people, and I love the way they put that robust and richer safety training. The more we invest in it, the more we get out of it. And that's not always true with a lot of processes. Sometimes we don't like we ultimately get a law of diminishing returns. If you keep investing it, it'll taper over time. And what they cursory found there is that over time, as you continue to put richness, robustness, investment, it still pays off when you're focused on making sure that the whole purpose of is not just to do it more and more, but to impart knowledge, skills or attitude. What do you what do you want to accomplish with that training? Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Always love it when we can talk about one of my favorite favorite things, and that's learning. And I am so happy you were able to take this journey with me. So until next time we chat, stay safe.

Announcer: 19:02

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