Certainly we all believe that as our workers get more experience in our workplaces and more familiar with our work site health and safety programs we may not have to train those experienced workers very often. Don’t we consider it an insult to experienced workers to continue to train them as if they don’t necessarily know or understand how to do their jobs or how to work safely?
[IMAGE CREDIT: Flickr user mrjerrymorgan]A recent study shows a connection between older people, a lack of recuperative sleep and memory loss. Could this mean that we approach workplace training all wrong?
On the other side of the spectrum, we believe that because our younger and less-experienced workers should be the candidates to be trained more often on policies and protocols to understand better those policies until those workers gain a certain level of experience and competence. But thanks to a recent study about brain function and sleep, there might be an argument for all of us treating our employees the opposite way that perhaps we should.
Matthew Walker, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a study that measured brain function in correlation to the amount of deep, regenerative sleep that people of varying ages get. As there has been a generally accepted idea that the older we get, the less recuperative sleep we get. And research has shown that when we get less recuperative sleep, our brain function suffers. One of the understood benefits of a recuperative sleep is that information gathered that day and stored in short-term memory, can be transferred into long-term memory storage during a recuperative sleep period. The theory goes that as we get older, we get less deep sleep and thus have more difficulty storing memories or information for easy recall.
Walker’s research found that that study subjects who were older reported 75 percent less deep sleep than younger participants, and that seemed to correlate with the ability to memorize some pieces of information. The study also found that older participants who had the lower amount of deep sleep did 55-percent worse than younger participants in memorizing word pairs.
What might this mean for your health and safety program? If this study holds true, we can take away from it that our younger employees may actually be better at retaining information that they learn in classes or seminars at your work site, especially if they get a longer amount of deep sleep every night. So against conventional wisdom, it might behoove you to instead focus resources on your older employees. If your older employees do in fact get less recuperative sleep each night, then they will be more likely to forget information they gather each day and retain it for a longer period of time.
Perhaps we can all think about how to implement our health and safety programs, and perhaps look at making those programs stick even better by focusing on our older employees. Perhaps we cannot assume that the more experienced our employees are that the less instruction they need. We might have to think of it not so much as these employees don’t necessarily need more instruction, but they may need more reminders than the younger generation.
If you would like more information, contact us at Purcell Enterprises and ask us about our books to implement a health and safety program, implement classes or workshops in your workplace, or to get consulting advice about how to implement and enforce a health and safety program for all of your employees – young and old.