Innovative approaches to grain industry safety training

Steven Kilger - 00:00
Hello! My name Steven Kilger, I’m the managing Editor for Feed & Grain Magazine and the host of the Feed & Grain Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we dive deep into the issues affecting the feed manufacturing, grain handling and allied industries.

Today’s episode is brought to you by The binwhip from Pneumat Systems. The powerful Dual Impact binwhip removes the toughest buildup and blockages in industrial storage silos – without hazardous silo entry. Learn more today at binwhip.com.

Today my guest is Joe Mlynek, content creation expert and partner at Safety Made Simple, we discuss the company's innovative approach to digital safety education in the grain and feed industries.

I hope you enjoy the interview. If you want to help out with the podcast and are listening to this in a podcasting app please rate us and subscribe! If you’re listening online signup for the Feed & Grain Newsletter Industry Watch to see when new podcasts drop and stay up to date with all of the news from around the industry.

Now onto the show.

Joe Mlynek - 01:00
You're very welcome Steve, thanks for having me.

Kilger - 01:02
Can you tell me and our listeners a little bit more about yourself?

Mlynek - 01:08
i've been in safety for almost 30 years. I started many years ago as an intern for a large agribusiness company and I actually was doing an environmental work and I gravitated toward safety so I moved into the automotive industry for three years, worked as a safety coordinator at an automotive plant and then I came back to the company that I did an internship for and spent 10 years in corporate safety. And then in 2009, I started my own consulting business, Progressive Safety Services. And in 2014 I kind of joined forces with Chuck Peary. He was a consultant out of the Kansas City area, did a lot of work in cattle feeding as a consultant and we started Safety Made Simple and particularly our focus and reach into the grain handling industry.

Kilger - 01:58
Can you tell us a little bit more about it? Because I think you have a great way to facilitate safety training, which can be hard to do in our industry since we're so spread out, especially for independent mills and things that just don't have the staff to really have a safety person there.

Mlynek - 02:12
Yeah, we started in 2014 to develop grain specific safety training and since then we've expanded into food safety and equipment maintenance and we really have an offering for just about any type of facility out there so just off the top of my head I'm thinking about some of our partners we've gotten. Grain elevators, erotomy centers, feed mills, flour mills, large and small farms, service provider, construction companies, feed yards, so the list goes on and on. And our clients are anywhere in size from a small company with fixed employees all the way up to cooperatives with thousands of employees. So we've kind of run the full gamut. We have about 150 online courses. They're all 15 to 20 minutes in length.

We provide them in both English and Spanish. And I think what kind of makes us unique is we have a subject matter expert team that's kind of second to norm. They're all industry professionals, most with over 20 years of experience in the ag world.

Kilger - 03:15
You touch on it a little bit, but what are some of the key features? You guys do primarily online safety training. When you log into your site, is it a subscription? How does that work?

Mlynek - 03:25
Yeah, it's a subscription base. We call them partners. Other people call them clients. We truly believe that we partner with companies to help send their people home safely. We offer a subscription that's based on bundles of courses. So you can get 12 courses, 24, 36, all the way up to 100 or a full catalog of 100 and shit. We often as well will create several different courses on the same topic so that each year people can kind of switch things in and out so things are fresh.

So that's kind of how we work. We offer that through what's called a learning management system, which I think more and more companies are taking advantage of these systems. That allow you to really easily assign and track employee training online and also run reports and generate reports and really see the status of anybody's training or their training records with a couple clicks of a mouse. So it's a really efficient system and our system also allows our partners to build their own content within our system.
So if they want to build courses that are specific to their operations that can do that within our system as well. They can upload videos and powerpoints and a whole gamut of different things that they can do.

Kilger - 04:35
Yeah, that's really cool. And you mentioned that your courses come in multiple languages, Spanish being the other one, which is a really big deal because from what i've heard from a lot of safety guys at facilities, that language barrier can be a big deal. So it's nice that you're accommodating for that.

Mlynek - 04:52
more of a challenge for people in the ag world as time goes on. We're seeing a lot of Spanish speaking employees and usually we just when we started we saw a lot of that in Texas and some of the southern states but we're seeing more and more of it not only just in ag facilities but also on the construction side as well. Companies, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration really expects that a company or requires that a company deliver training in a language that an employee can easily understand. And there's a couple different ways to look at that. The first would be their native language. So if you have Spanish speaking employees, obviously having courses in Spanish is a benefit, but it goes a little bit beyond that as well. And we're really good at this is We have anybody from college graduates to people that didn't go to high school taking our courses, so we kind of hit it right in the middle.

Mlynek - 05:41
Not to get too fancy with the words or be confusing or anything like that, but really, you know, clear and concise and simple in our message to the end user or what we call our learners.

Kilger - 05:52
Yeah. How do you guys keep things interesting? You mentioned the kind of the 20 minute roughly video length, which I mean, I think is perfect. It's always terrible when you get into a training and it's an hour and a half long. The whole thing. But is that part of it? What else do you do to kind of keep people engaged and make sure that they're actually taking in the information?

Mlynek - 06:13
The challenge with any training, whether it's classroom training or in an online format is keeping employees engaged. So we have a number of techniques that we use. A video is something that press play and you hope that somebody pays attention. With an online course and we're really fortunate. We have an instructional designer and a learning expert. Her name's Peggy Paulman and she's developed courses for Fortune 100 companies. Very good at what she does, just throw up the half her, but there's a number of techniques and strategies that she uses within a course to keep people engaged.

Mlynek - 06:50
I don't think, Steve, that a minute or two will go by in a course where somebody doesn't have to interact with So some of the techniques that she'll use is she uses characters is one thing that we do. So each one of our courses has case study of an employee. They either did something right or maybe made the wrong decision and something good or something bad happened to them. So we use a lot of characters and that really allows people to interact and it allows us to drive our content home as well. So we use characters throughout the courses on these case studies. We'll also use what we call thought questions. They're just the engaging way to get learners to think about the whys behind the information that we're giving and ask them to answer something.

And then we'll have various exercises throughout courses, things like drag and drop matching exercises, those types of things. And then whenever we ask questions, some of the other things that we do is just to provide what we call remediation or feedback at the end of the activity to just increase that retention. So if we ask a question, we tell them why that's true or why that's false. So just really reemphasizing. The courses continue to get more and more interactive. I just was working on an update that we did this morning and it never ceases to amaze me how Peggy continues to just be able to use new strategies and ways of keeping people engaged with the program to get through it. So it's that something, like I said earlier, like a video that you can just press play and kind of tune out.

You really have to be engaged with the program.

Kilger - 08:24
i've noticed even in my own training for us, it's, you know, cybersecurity and things like that. It is much more interactive than it used to be when I started my career. That seems good because I don't know about other people, but for me, I'd usually turn on the video in one tab in my browser there. So how do you measure the effectiveness of your online training program? You kind of mentioned how you're always evolving it. What steps do you do to continuously kind of improve the content and get feedback from those that are Yeah, we stay really in tune with our partners.

Mlynek - 09:00
There's actually somebody on our team at Safety Made Simple that is continually monitoring their progress and their course completion rates and those types of things to see how we can help them. One of the ways I measure is when I'm out in the field and I still do a little bit of consulting work out there, Steven. I'll ask people questions that I know are in their training when I'm out in the field and people get them right. Somebody's teaching them that in a lot of instances, that's what we're doing. You know, the staff I work with on our content development team has really just taken everything that we've used. We were all classroom trainers at one time and put them into an online format. So we do a lot of informal type of engagement as well.

Mlynek - 09:41
And I get good feedback. Like I had a safety director one time say that, an employee exited a grain elevator because he smelled this odor of dead fish and he says I think the employee said I think it was phosphine in there so we took the monitor and the monitor indicated there were phosphine levels and he goes well how did it how did you know it smelled like dead fish and he goes well we took that safety made simple class on hazards of fumigation so you get like that. But as far as the continuous improvement piece, it's not really hard for us. The team I work with, think we're pretty blessed.They're never really overly impressed by themselves. They don't sit back and go, hey, look at what we did or look how good we are.

It's always, what can we do to get better? We have a continual effort to update our existing programs. We know, like, you know, we were just talking about videos. A lot of companies out there have been using the same video for 5 to 10 years. And you get that feedback, we're watching the same video. And I don't want that to happen for our partners. So we are constantly updating our courses.

And when we update this, comes out looking like a completely different course from the version that we created several years ago. So we do at least one new update per month. And then we also develop one new course per month. Now, a lot of these courses come from feedback. We do a survey really around the end of summer to start our plans for the upcoming year. And a lot of our courses come from feedback of the partners that we have and as I mentioned earlier with Peggy Paulman and she's really makes all of this happen in the back packages all this up. She's kind of a self-proclaimed online training nerd and she tells me you know she's always on the different webinars and attending conferences and types of things.

Really to make sure that we stay up with the latest trends and the tools that are out there. So each time I see a new course come across my screen for review and I have to, a lot of them I'm involved in the actual development but I actually approve all of them.
There's always something in there, a new twist that she's tried, a new strategy to engage learners. And we kind of know just from, we want to make sure that we keep things fresh for our partners.

But we also, from a business standpoint, know that we stand still for a minute, that one of our competitors will run right by.

Kilger - 12:13
You're obviously probably much more aware of this than I am, but with OSHA regulations and things like that, a big part of it is always training your employees and then making sure to keep records of those trainings so you can then show them to an inspector. How does your kind of training program comply with those relevant regulations and standards?

Mlynek - 12:24
i'll talk about the tracking part first. The learning management system that we have makes it really easy for an administrator and you can have multiple administrators within the same organization to assign courses to their employees. We provide a compliance training matrix that's based off of OSHA, EPA, DOT that gives them a little bit of help with that. Other larger companies we have that are full safety team don't need as much help with that, but that's just a resource. Let's say an employee is assigned, you can assign employees courses individually or even by groups. So a group would be like a facility or even job classifications, maintenance or truck drivers. Once they enter a course, they're going to be asked at the end to pass a 10 question quiz.

Everything in the quiz will really link back to what they learned throughout the course. And these are key things we want them to understand from a compliance standpoint and more importantly, just from a safety standpoint. The company has the ability to really establish the passing score for those tests and it's usually you can set it at 100% theoretically if you wanted. Default is 80%. Once they pass that course, their training records are all kept within the system. So I can easily as an administrator run a report for an employee on his employee training history and I can also run that for a facility as well. There's other reporting functions that allow you to kind of develop your own custom reports and the system will actually email them to whoever you want them to go through at a certain day and a certain time.

As far as the OSHA compliance piece and some of the regulatory, myself and others on the contact team, we develop the courses based on regulations. Most of our courses, some of them are best practice things like near miss reporting. Hazard Analysis and that kind thing, but those types of courses teach people the basis of safety. But we do have these compliance topics. I would tell you we stay away from within our courses focusing too much references to regulations and OSHA and DOT. What it's important we put that in there, but at the end of the day, we want people to understand the hazards in the work area. And what's required of them or what practices they can implement to get themselves home at the end of the day.

Our goal isn't to make them a safety professional or a compliance professional, it's to get them home safely at the end of the day. That's truly what our mission is. I would say that we've on multiple occasions had some of our partners receive citations, unfortunately, from maybe it's OSHA. And as part of their follow-up or their meetings with OSHA and informal conferences OSHA sometimes will request copies of training. We've had, what we'll do is provide them a narration document of one of our courses so they can see what was included in that course. We base them off of the training requirements that are really given to us by OSHA. On multiple occasions they've always accepted and said yeah these employees were properly trained.

We even had one company that was cited for lockout tagout that they actually OSHA had cited them for not adequately training their employees. We showed them our course and then the training records for the employees at that facility and they dropped the citation. So We do keep the compliance thing in the back of our mind. I think, Steve, you know, the other question is what are some of the other things that we provide to our partners to help them stay current and educate their employees? And a lot of these things aren't limited to just our partners. We do a tremendous amount of outreach through the year as well. We have a new letter that goes out monthly called the Safety Scoop.

Kilger - 16:01
Just to interject, I do get and it is very good.

Mlynek - 16:03
So people should sign up for Yeah, and you can sign up on our website, it's www.safetymaysaycle.com. We generally highlight if there's any national or local emphasis plans from OSHA or those types of things. We have an Is It Safe feature that's really popular. The pictures we use in the Is It Safe feature may come from our partners or may come from myself when I'm out in field. So I know a lot of people use those in their own training cut and paste that in our Course Builder course and send it out to everybody to take a look at. Within the newsletter as well, we release what we call Take 5 Safety Talk. It's a toolbox talk.

So we release one of those every month. Anybody that gets our newsletter can take that PDF and download it and send it out. For our partners, we actually have a library of those. I think we're somewhere around 80 of these toolbox talks that they have access to that they can grab at any particular point. We also do quarterly outreach videos. So they're short, usually two to three minutes on some topics. I've got one coming out in June.

That's line of fire incident. So we'll get those out to our email distribution list, which is thousands of people throughout the ag world. We do a video series for the Grain Safety Stand Up that's brought to you by OSHA and NGFA and GEAPS and the Grain Handling Safety Council and those types things where we'll talk about things that impact grain elevators. And then I also do a what we call the Safety Simplified blog. We're sending that out monthly to everybody on our mailing list as well. We balance our messages on compliance topics and also best practices for folks in the industry.

Kilger - 17:37
That's really cool. I really like your focus on best practices because like you stated, people aren't, you shouldn't be doing this because they want to comply with the government. They should be doing it because it's going to keep them safe and keep them going home at night, which is what the goal is for everybody.

Mlynek - 17:53
Compliance is kind of funny. When I started in the safety world, I worked for my boss, the safety director at the time, so he didn't focus a lot. We talked about regulations occasionally, but his philosophy was if we do the best for the employee and try to make the safest work environment possible, most of the time we'll be in compliance. And he said, and at the very least, we'll have a really good argument.

Kilger - 18:15
And I think spot That's a really good philosophy for safety in general. Do you have any success stories, companies that come to mind that really saw big measurable improvements in their safety programs, their outcomes, employee engagement, any of that kind of thing?

Mlynek - 18:33
There's two of them that come to mind, if there's more, but the two that come to mind, the first one is a mid-sized grain company, maybe, I don't know, 150 employees, maybe nine or 10 locations. They had no real formal safety training program prior to using Safety Made Simple. I think they did give some materials to their managers or supervisor and ask them to cover them with their employees. It's what I run into a lot of times is supervisors and managers. Some of them are really good trainers. They're just not comfortable in front of a group or sometimes just don't have an hour with somebody with a safety background and that's no fault of theirs at all. With this company they went with Safety Made Simple and with them a few years.

They're part of a captive insurance group and the captive insurance group is made up of a lot of different types of ag facilities. Could be commercial farms and grain elevators and flour mills and all that kind of thing. And they were awarded a gold award by the captive for the best safety performance. Now, safety performance as far as injuries and those types of things was a component of it. Training was a component, inspections, all those types things. They were quick to give us a pat on the back saying that we made an impact at their company. So that was one.

 Don't have a lot of hard data there, but we feel and I think they feel that we had an impact and they're receiving that award. I do know we have a partner in Minnesota full service cooperative, their grain agronomy energy, somewhere around 350 employees. Now they saw a dramatic increase in their first three years of safety made simple.
So from year one to year three, their lost time injuries decreased by 75%. Total loss workdays were around the same and their total recordable incidents rate.
Went down by about 40%. So we recognized that we were just part of that effort.

They were very quick to provide us with those numbers saying, hey, we think this was a contributing factor. So we have had a lot of success with that, but we also recognize as well that they had to do a lot of the work with some other strategies as well.

Kilger - 20:37
So now I'm going to ask you the hardest question. So let's say you're listening to this and you're interested, what should people do if they want to get in contact with you and maybe discuss a little bit more about what Safety Made Simple has to offer?

Mlynek - 20:49
Sure. I'll give them two avenues. One, our website is www.safetymadesimple.com.
There are several ways on there contact us and probably a little sticky will pop up when you go to the site and ask you if you'd like more information. The second would be just to feel free to email me. It's [email protected] and just email me and if you're interested in some further information we can provide that to you or we can just chat on the phone for few minutes as well.

Kilger - 21:17
Well, that's great. Thank you so much, Joe, for speaking to me today and tell me and the listeners what you do. All of your website and all that will be linked in the show notes. Thank you everyone out there for listening.