Environmental Training: How to Get Your Team Onboard

Most of the facilities we enter as consultants have pretty strict environmental standards that the facility must uphold. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does NOT play around when it comes to industrial plants.

- Paul Farless

Generally, most of these plants are on the edge of towns, though some are in a rural setting. Power generation facilities, for example, are usually located near a river or lake and must abide by very strict rules and regulations set by the EPA. Every facility has to dispose of its manufacturing byproduct, debris, disposables and waste properly or risk being shut down. Proper, thorough environmental training is a large part of ensuring that these rules and regulations are met.

Scheduling

Training in these facilities, no matter the industry, is usually death-by-PowerPoint style training. Pulling the techs out of the field when they have a thousand things going on and making them sit through a two-hour PowerPoint presentation and then pulling one of them out every five minutes to "fight a fire" is probably the worst way to do training. I understand that time is nearly impossible to carve out in today's industry. Since the pandemic, I have yet to go to a facility that isn't running as lean as possible: each team member is wearing multiple hats and is busier than they have ever been. I think the first step in getting your team onboard is to schedule the training around major events months in advance. Schedule these trainings carefully and deliberately.