Learning Strategies to Design Engaging Online Health & Safety Training – Part 1

Safety training is a must and makes business sense as it reduces accident-related absenteeism, loss of productivity, medical costs, and legal penalties.

Many companies choose eLearning for their mandatory health and safety training requirements, as it’s easy to develop, at low costs. However, some complain the effectiveness of training may be compromised online; learners may get bored or distracted. But the good news is, you need not compromise on the quality, effectiveness, and engagement of your online safety training.

Developing online safety training using various learning strategies will make all the difference. Let’s explore 4 such strategies in this post.

1. Scenario-based Safety Training

A scenario-based learning strategy for health & safety training is helpful to introduce risk situations, help employees identify the possible threats, and encourage employees to think of the best possible solutions.

Including real work-life scenarios and adding a relevant context to follow the safety rules & regulations makes better sense to your employees. Scenarios can be based on accidents or incidents that occurred earlier.

Safety training scenarios provide a platform to your employees to make choices and take decisions based on the prevailing situations. It’s always easy to show the results or consequences based on the choices/decisions learners make.

Here are the major benefits of scenarios for health and safety training:

• Allows learners to make choices and take decisions on their own
• Experience the impact of decisions in a virtual and risk-free environment
• Build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills so that employees can face real-life situations in the future
• Connect emotionally with the workforce to help them understand difficult concepts easily

2. Safety Videos

Demonstrating safety procedures through videos will be more effective than mere words. Short safety training videos can be accessed on mobile devices and employees can watch them at the point of need. They give a realistic look and clear understanding of safety procedures. Making the videos relevant to the context will leave a mark on learners so that they never forget the safety concepts. Videos are also effective to educate learners on equipment handling techniques.

In safety training videos, you can show the causes for accidents, risky situations, and the precautionary measures to be taken. A video containing the CEO’s speech on the importance of safety at workplace and the benefits of safety training will have a high impact and motivate learners. Learners will pay attention to small videos than lengthy ones. They convey the key takeaways with maximum impact.

You can make safety training videos more effective with a catchy storyline, narrative, and characters resembling workers. They can be produced with live actors, animated characters, or images, based on your budget.

3. Storytelling

Storytelling strategy in online safety training helps you get the much-needed attention from your employees. This helps them visualize safety compliance concepts in their minds and connect with the given information. Incorporating rules, health and safety regulations in a story will generate innate interest and facilitate learning.

Stories the insipid safety training into an engaging learning exercise. For example, you can base your online course on the story of a factory worker who has lost his limbs as a result of not adhering to the safety procedures.

According to the research report by Elaine T. Cullen of Spokane Research Laboratory, blue-collared workers prefer to learn on the job, in a hands-on environment. They share ‘near-miss’ incidents with other workers and exchange stories of their seniors’ skills and expertise in stories. These not just pass information, but also impart a safety culture and inculcate values in an informal manner.

4. Case Studies

A case study is an effective instructional approach to train your employees on safety. They show clear proof on how training helped maintain safety precautions at the workplace under certain circumstances. This is how workers understand the importance of safety. For example, if you are designing a course on workplace safety policies recommended by OSHA or HSE, add case studies of workers who violated these norms and the consequences they suffered. This will evoke the needed seriousness at work to follow safety procedures.

I will cover four more learning strategies to design and develop engaging online safety training in my next blog. Hope you will leverage these approaches to develop effective online health and safety training. Wish you the best!!