This blog explains how to make your online health and safety training interactive, engaging, effective and exciting.
Making your online health and safety training interactive, engaging, interesting and enjoyable is a challenge. The moment you say health and safety training, the first thing that comes to your employees’ minds is boring slide turning courses with click on activities. Not just you, many training managers face this issue. But the good news is, you can add life to your dry health and safety training by following the seven learning design tips discussed in this post.
1. Include Demonstration Videos
Integrating videos that bring health and safety concepts at the workplace to life will make your online employee health and safety training more engaging. Captivating storyline, characters resembling employees will facilitate an immersive learning experience. It’s so powerful that employees will absorb all the training.
You can produce videos with live actors, animated characters, or just slides with images and some information and a voice over narration, depending on your budget.
2. Add a Humor Quotient
You need the humor element to make your boring health and safety online course engaging and interactive. In the name of humor, don’t fill the entire course with jokes and funny comments. The extra dose of fun can distract your employees from learning.
A small dose of humor wherever necessary, a funny conversational script, occasional witty comments will make your online training lively. When your humor quotient is positive, encouraging, and culture-appropriate, your online health and safety training will yield the expected results.
3. Spice up with Storytelling
Storytelling in online health and safety training helps get the much needed attention from your employees. This strategy helps your learners to visualize compliance concepts in their minds and connect with the provided information. Incorporating the rules, health and safety regulations in a story will take an interesting form to facilitate learning.
According to a 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 tell stories of their seniors’ skills and expertise in stories. These will not just pass information, but impart a safety culture and inculcate values in a very informal manner. Stories build up the emotional connect that is necessary for learning.
4. Gamify to Elevate the Fun Factor
Sometimes online learning courses on compliance & safety turn out to be monotonous, passive, and there is no scope for learners to respond or participate. Gamifying your online health and safety training helps your employees actively participate in the learning activity.
Offering awards, badges, and incentives to some extent is ok, but overdoing it can lead them astray from learning. Employees completely rely upon these extrinsic motivators in some cases. That’s a sign of boredom, so changing the instructional strategy or giving relevant rewards will keep them on track.
5. Divide into Bite-Sized Modules
The problem with health and safety training is, a large quantity of information is available at your disposal. Learners can be easily fed up with lengthy modules and assessments. All this makes your learning experience unpleasant.
You can get rid of all this when you divide the online health and safety training content into bite-sized modules of 5-10 minutes. Chunk the content systematically, condense the information, and use bulleted lists and graphics wherever possible, to help you make the most out your health and safety training.
6. Include Real Work Life Scenarios
Following rules and regulations without providing a relevant context will not make sense to learners. Scenarios provide a platform to your learners to make choices. Showing them the results/consequences is easy, based on the choices they make. Adding scenarios in online health and safety training will build an emotional connection.
It will also:
- Allow learners to make choices and take decisions on their own
- Experience the impact of decisions in a virtual environment
All this helps know the value of complying with norms in.
7. Provide an Online Guide
Using a guided learning strategy will help your employees go through the course, aided by a guide. You can use the online character as a facilitator, narrator, or an expert who provides health & safety tips whenever needed. Guided learning in health and safety training creates a virtual learning environment that enables learners to feel the presence of an online instructor.
These tips can come in handy when you wish to create an active learning experience to your employees. So, try them out in your next online health and safety training!
