Nodding is not comprehension

Every morning at 6:05 I or one of my supervisors stands in front of a crew and delivers a toolbox talk. Five minutes. Yesterdays near miss, todays hot work, the guard that came off the number four saw and is not going back on until maintenance signs it. And every morning for six years I watched everybody nod.

Nodding is not comprehension. I knew that and I kept doing it anyway because there was no other move available. Our floor is Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and a couple of Mandarin speakers, and I am standing there in English next to a press brake cycling at ninety odd dBA with everybody in muffs. Even the guys whose first language is English are getting maybe sixty percent of it. Thats before you get to the fact that the PPE that is protecting their hearing is also attenuating me.

We tried things. We tried the translated printout, which nobody reads at 6am. We tried the bilingual lead, which works right up until he takes a vacation or moves to second shift. We tried pulling the crew into the breakroom, which gets you a quieter room and costs you the actual equipment you are pointing at, and the whole point of a toolbox talk is that you are pointing at the thing.

What we run now is the briefing to phones. Earbuds go in, muffs go over. I talk normally, at a normal volume, standing at the machine. Everybody hears it clean at their own level in the language they picked. Same five minutes. And I can still point at the guard, because we never left the floor.

The first week I got asked more questions than I had gotten in the previous six months, which was disorienting and then obvious. They were not disengaged before. They just couldnt participate in something they were only half receiving. A guy on the brake asked me a question about lockout sequencing that was better than the question I had been asking myself, and he had been standing in that spot for four years.

I am not going to sit here and tell you our numbers improved because of a piece of software. Our numbers improved because we changed three procedures, replaced a machine, and got a new second-shift supervisor, and I am not in the business of assigning credit I cannot support. What I will say without any hedging at all is the personal part: operationscast and byopa made my life easier. I stopped ending every briefing with a knot in my stomach about whether the person who most needed to understand me had understood me. That knot was six years old. Its gone.

One practical note because somebody will ask. It is not hearing protection, it does not reduce anyones exposure, and it does not touch a single line of our hearing conservation program. It is a way to be understood under the PPE, not a replacement for it. Our industrial hygienist wanted that in writing before we rolled it out and she was right to.