Having a good workers' safety program is key to preventing hazards, keeping workers comp premiums down, and improving employee morale. Traditionally, this has taken the form of in-person classroom training. However, this has significant downsides: it tends to be expensive, retention is often low because you are giving a lot of information infrequently, and it takes people away from the job site for a significant chunk of time.
Because of this, a safety plan is not enough. Making that plan a reality involves ensuring retention, building a culture of safety, and helping employees learn in ways that best suit them. Automating safety training solves many of these issues.
What is Automated Safety Training?
Automated safety training uses digitized lessons and quizzes, delivered through text and email and done at the employees' own pace. These lessons are shorter and are designed to be taken during downtime, with the employee then returning immediately to work. This improves retention and engagement as well as helping make good use of time employees must spend waiting.
Why Automate Safety Training?
There are eight excellent reasons to automate your safety training:
Increase Retention Through Engagement
The shorter lessons provide greater engagement and thus improved retention. We tend to forget 75% of what we learn, so anything that improves that is a good thing.
Additionally, automated safety training involves gamification, which tends to improve both engagement and compliance. Quizzes and tests hold interest, and the automated system means they are not extra work for managers.
Increase Retention Through Microlearning
Automated safety training involves very short segments. For example, instead of sitting through a one hour safety orientation, employees will receive a series of three-minute videos, each focused on a very specific thing. This stays within people's attention spans, with recent studies showing that short content can increase retention by as much as 20%.
Because each segment is short, it's easier to provide it in multiple formats for different learner types. And, of course, it's easier to get them done.
Lower Labor Costs
With traditional safety training, you either need to have a manager or supervisor take time out of their day or hire an expensive outside trainer. Automated safety training frees up managers to do the rest of their job and ultimately saves money. Instead, everyone does their training individually, and because training can be done in short batches at convenient times, you aren't paying somebody to sit in a classroom for hours.
Continual Learning
Because of the expense of traditional training, it tends to be front loaded. Training takes place at the start of projects, when employees are onboarded, or at certain times of a year. Within a few months, it is all forgotten.
With automated training you can schedule the training sessions through the year, improving retention and making sure everyone is up-to-date. It also makes it easier to reach all of your employees, even ones on awkward shifts or who are working at a remote site. The lessons are pushed to everyone's devices as needed.
Safety Information on Demand
Your employees can also access any of the training materials at any time. If they are feeling unsure of something, they can easily go back and check. If they see a coworker struggling, they can encourage them to review the material. This means that they always have access to the information they need.
It's much better to have an employee stop to check information than plow forward and get hurt.
Simplify Safety
Traditional training tends to throw a lot of information at your employees. The safety briefings need to be useful to everyone, which can result in them being useful to no one. As different people have different responsibilities and concerns, they don't all need the same training, but it can be too expensive in both time and money to hold multiple classes for different people.
Long lectures lead to information overload and lack of retention. In contrast, with an automated safety training system, you can assign different modules to each worker based on their job requirements or the site’s specific needs. You can change this at any time as people move from one task to another. This allows for a much simpler and more flexible system.
Easily Customizable
Training is not one size fits all. Your company's specific needs may vary from those of others, and outside trainers may not be familiar with them, leaving managers to do the training.
An automated safety training system allows you to select relevant modules, leave out ones that are not, and spend only the amount of money you need on custom lessons. You can keep changing and updating as you improve your processes or as projects come to an end and new ones begin.
Ensure OSHA Compliance
Because automated training systems record compliance and grades, you get a full record of training that you can use to ensure that you are compliant with OSHA regulations. You can avoid expensive fines, keep your employees safe, and be aware of who might be falling behind and need extra help.
In fact, best-in-class automated safety training software includes digitized checklists and audits, sent out to employees and supervisors when and as they need it. It is fully customizable, allowing managers to integrate the right lessons.
You can purchase this software through a subscription, but it is also offered by some PEOs, such as ZampHR, free of charge to their partners.
