It’s very important to repeat and reinforce safety training for convenience-store employees because they will forget what they have learned, said Aaron Nelson, director of account management at Maple Valley, Washington-based CAF Outdoor Cleaning.
Nelson spoke in a session on preventing accidents and keeping employees safe at the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) Show on Oct. 14 in Chicago.
Nelson referenced the “forgetting curve,” which is “when an employee is receiving a whole bunch of information all at once.”
He said, “The forgetting curve posits this: Within one hour, they will forget 50% of everything they learned. Within a day, they’ll forget as much as 70%, and within a month, they could forget 90% of all that information that you worked so hard to deliver to them. So, you’ve got to repeat and reinforce the training that you are getting your teams if you want them to remember.”
Nelson said that when he once visited a convenience store, he was inside with the manager, and he saw an employee outside “on her hands and knees, on the fuel pad, emptying out a spill bucket full of water with a turkey baster.”
She wasn’t wearing a safety vest and there were no safety cones around her, he said, and cars were zooming back and forth.
“I turned to the store manager and said, ‘It’s really unsafe. You should change that.”
Nelson added, “Well, it wasn’t a week later before that same store manager called me.”
A car had run over that employee’s leg and broke her ankle, Nelson said.
“It could have been so much worse,” he said. “Fortunately, it wasn’t worse than that. That was like a slap in the face. It woke me up. Why didn’t that employee care about her own safety? Well, it was probably because the store manager never talked to her about safety. And why didn’t the store manager talk about safety? Probably because I never talked to her about safety.”
Nelson continued, “So, if you want to achieve downline buy-in to all your safety plans and protocols, you’ve got to get people talking about safety. You’ve got to get the next-level supervisor talking about safety. It’s super important.”
Nelson equated safety with the Broken Windows Theory.
“It posits, essentially this: that a problem left unaddressed becomes a bigger problem down the line,” he said.
“If you’ve got a dilapidated building on a block somewhere, and there’s a couple of broken windows and nobody addresses the broken windows, every teenager that walks by is going to be attracted to picking up a rock and breaking more of the windows because, hey, that’s fun,” he said.
In the c-store industry, he said, not removing graffiti leads to more graffiti “because it’s clear nobody cares to clean up the graffiti,” he said. “It’s suddenly now an open playground for those who attack your sites. So, the broken window theory is very, very real in the realm of safety.
“Essentially, the lack-safety culture will lead to more lapses in safety,” he said, adding that safety must be discussed and be part of the culture.
“You have to train on safety,” he said.
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