Lives are at stake. Is your 100-slide WSH PowerPoint working?
There can be no compromise when it comes to safety training. Here’s how we make WSH training effective. PowerPoints optional.
When the average person’s attention span is supposedly under 10 seconds (less than a goldfish’s), no-one realistically believes we can pay full attention throughout a 2-hour lecture. Not even when the subject matter is as important as Workplace Safety and Health (“WSH”).
Yet many companies’ WSH trainings are 100-slide PowerPoints. How sure are we that staff are absorbing this important knowledge. Or even listening?!?
In industries like construction, manufacturing etc. — there’s real risk of injury or death if proper safety procedures aren’t followed.
So what can we do better to make sure that the training knowledge is effectively absorbed by our workforce so they can put it into practice?
Circle back to MOTIVATION
First and foremost, always emphasise to your staff that the reason that WSH training is necessary is to protect THEIR lives.
For example, how do we motivate staff to be trained to wear earplugs properly?
(i) Emphasise that learning how to wearing earplugs correctly greatly reduces the chance of noise-induced deafness, or Tinnitus disease (permanent ringing sound in the ears).
(ii) Show workers a video of the much more difficult the life of a hearing-impaired person using hearing aids.
(iii) Round it up by making it relevant for them. Emphasise that knowing the WSH measures and adhering to them means they can continue to be healthy, employed, and earn salaries to bring home for THEIR FAMILIES.
This first step is crucial, as it puts workers in the right frame of mind to receive their training.
Make Training Effective
Here are 4 simple steps that help you maximise your WSH training impact:
- Keep it short. Training shouldn’t be conducted in a 2-hour stretch. Nobody can pay attention for that long. So break them up into shorter segments as schedules permit.
- Use digital & multimedia for better learner engagement & knowledge retention. Create digital learning modules, and use simple pictures & infographics that often convey knowledge better than lots of text. Videos should also be used if resources permit (Lume5, which we use ourselves, is an example of affordable & easy-to-use video software).
- Build in interactivity & assessment. After knowledge has been conveyed, test retention with simple assessment quizzes, which can be multiple-choice or open-ended. This gives your organisation the data to work more with staff who need more help.
- Provide performance support. By making learning materials digital, these can now be housed in the cloud, readily accessible as Digital SOPs as-and-when your staff need it. A good time could be right before they start their construction project, to ensure they refresh all the WSH training knowledge, to keep themselves safe onsite.
Your workers are now able to absorb your important WSH training content in bite-sizes:
“Just-in-time, just-enough, just-for me”
You have certainty that they understand the material, and can help those who need a little more guidance.
Supervisors and foremen can then focus their attention on ensuring compliance, which should come automatically because workers know the importance of WHY they should comply, and are effectively trained on HOW to put into practice.
Create YOUR OWN effective WSH Training
We conclude by sharing a sample WSH module built on ArcLab’s mobile learning platform.
Feel free to try it out.
You can adapting it for your workforce simply by using ArcLab’s Remix feature.
Select from the different templates in ArcLab Discover, and remix them easily to fit your company’s branding, tone, messaging and specific training content.
Use ArcLab to easily distribute training to your workers via email or SMS, so they can easily consume the training.
Everything is made fuss-free and effective for you and your workers.
Because your workers’ safety & health are important. Their lives are at stake. If you need any help on how to start, drop us an email at growth@arclab.io.
