Whole new world of safety training

Employers today are often faced with the challenge of training workers with low literacy skills or with English as their second language, engaging multiple generations accustomed to different teaching methods, and reaching hundreds or thousands of employees across various locations. Rather than providing text-heavy documents and expecting people to read them, digital videos, mobile apps or games offer immersive, memorable experiences while incorporating learning objectives, and at the same time, flexibility around how businesses present training.

On the whole, safety material is rather dry, perhaps even repetitive to experienced workers. Capturing the attention of workers leads to better learning outcomes, which importantly reduces business risk and can help to prevent injuries or save lives. Should you then be looking to incorporate digital technology into your safety training?

From enforcement to engagement

Research from RMIT University suggests workers in construction, more so than other industries, have less education behind them and often don’t read safety documents before working on-site. Health and safety (H&S) training also usually involves an ‘expert’ instructor passing on knowledge to recipients, which is thought to be ineffective when applied to adult learning. This style also focuses on enforcing compliance with rules, rather than asking workers to be involved in the design of systems of work which can bypass knowledge employees may have already gained from the tasks they perform.^[1]

Helen Lingard, Professor, Construction Occupational Health and Safety at RMIT, said in an article published on The Conversation:

Visual methods, including video, can overcome some of these difficulties. For a long time videos have been used to communicate health and safety information to workers. But safety training videos are often produced by technical experts or media companies and shown to workers in stand-alone presentations. In such uses, workers are passive audiences to generic video materials.^[2]

Melbourne-based firm CodeSafe Solutions has designed a method to meet these challenges. Workers are given basic media training and are then encouraged to script, act and record films to visually show their safety knowledge from their everyday work practices. Using Quick Response (QR) code technology, workers can then share videos with colleagues, which can be easily accessed by a smartphone or tablet. RMIT researchers evaluated the experience of several organisations that worked with CodeSafe and discovered that workers and managers, when watching back the videos, found problems in standard operating procedures. Lingard said that this then resulted in several instances where equipment or processes were redesigned to improve safety.

What the researchers also found was that people responded to and engaged better with the visual, participatory nature of the videos. One worker commented: “I think it’s the best way for people to learn. I mean, just from my point of view, being on a building site I don’t read too much at all, especially when I get on-site. I’m here to do a job, you know what I mean?”^[3] Another commented: “Yeah, it’s good for everyone to throw their input in and you just learn a lot more about what could be done, and it gets your mind thinking.”^[4]

Gaming and training

Getting people to think and engage with a topic has often been effectively achieved through gaming. A game is usually more fun, more likely to keep a person’s interest and therefore assist with learning outcomes.

Technology analysts Gartner say gamification has become an essential part of digital business strategies as a way of motivating people, but most organisations aren’t getting it right. Gartner defines gamification as the use of “game mechanics and experience design” to digitally engage and inspire people to achieve their goals. Further, it needs to touch people on an emotional rather than a transactional level.

“Gamification is about motivating people to achieve their own goals, not the organisation’s goals,” said Gartner Research Vice President Brian Burke. “The sweet spot for gamification is shared goals. If a business can identify the goals it shares with its audience or provide its audience with goals that are meaningful to them, then it can leverage gamification to motivate these players to meet those goals, and the company will achieve its business outcomes as a consequence.”

Some ways to do this include presenting people with practical challenges and encouraging them as they progress through levels, thereby gaining their emotional investment. “Game mechanics and design have been used to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals throughout recorded history,” said Burke. “Gamification is about rethinking motivation in a world where we are more often connected digitally than physically.” Burke also says we are just at the start of this journey and gamification will continue to develop for many years to come.

Can safety be a game?

According to Justin Wight, director of Australian online content developer Monkeystack, the animation and games industry has matured and is now widely accepted in the entertainment-education space. His company recently partnered with Flinders University to produce a gaming app, involving a computerised nurse, to offer participants a better understanding around the warning signs and the best response to heart attacks. He said the app gamifies a complex issue well.

“It provides the perfect education ... and it can work hand in hand with nurses,” Wight explained. Initial results showed the interactive app helped increase patient knowledge by more than 15% and symptom recognition by more than 24%.

Image courtesy Flinders University.

With good design, gaming has the power to translate into real-world skills and behaviours. Walmart is a good example of this. In 2012 it piloted game-based training from Axonify for around 5000 of its logistics workers across eight distribution centres. Using three-minute games with interspersed multiple choice questions on safety procedures, the games provided repeated instructions in short intervals. This format was highly suited to Walmart’s distribution centres because three minutes was the amount of time needed to recharge a forklift battery. While the battery charged, the forklift operator was encouraged to play the game. Walmart reported a 54% decrease in incidents at these centres where it was tested, and considered the pilot’s success the start of its efforts to gamify worker safety.^[5]

Microlearning: moving from deep to hyper attention

Some, however, are less convinced ‘gamification’ is the answer to the modern worker and workplace training, and that a more powerful teaching methodology is ‘microlearning’. According to microlearning experts Grovo, this is “the process of building successful behaviours in small, focused segments”.^[6] They say each microlearning intervention is built around one highly focused, self-contained learning unit, which can be in any format, such as a video, game or GIF. It involves continual performance improvement by changing behaviour bit by bit.

In a world where we’re less able to concentrate on one object or piece of information for long periods of time (deep attention), but instead quickly switch focus between multiple objects with less tolerance for boredom (hyper attention), microlearning is thought to overcome the challenges of traditional learning. It offers chunks of information in shorter time periods, ie, 3–7 minutes, thereby matching the brain’s working memory and attention span. This is also beneficial for busy workers who are reluctant or less able to complete hours of training at a time, and more cost-effective for businesses.^[7]

Training on your head

Digitally connecting workers in a new way — literally straight onto their head this time — is the institute for production technology, Fraunhofer IPT. The institute’s software solution ‘oculavis’, which integrates smart devices within the production process, was taken up by Hungarian company Robert Bosch Elektronika Kft. to train new staff in assembly line procedures.

‘Smart glasses’, which comprise a camera for recording videos and images, allow workers to quickly visualise each step in an operation right in front of them — without a clunky manual. The glasses are particularly useful for complex work sequences and can also link staff with video telephony to receive direct instructions or to production machines via OPC-UA. Fraunhofer said the smart glasses can also enable new, untrained employees to learn and work independently straight away, while experienced staff who may be liable to make mistakes when there is a change of model can benefit from the personal imaging system. Researchers at the institute believe it soon will no longer be necessary to painstakingly document suggestions for product or process improvements in writing, as it can now be recorded clearly on the spot via photo, video and speech recording.

Digital technologies can therefore clearly offer businesses numerous possibilities for improving staff engagement and learning beyond the written document. Those incorporating digital learning into their H&S training are reporting on improved safety gains, offering a strong argument to move on from passive training towards immersive, short experiences. The challenge will be finding a solution that best suits a business’s budget, workforce and educational requirements.

Top image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/sdecoret. Bottom image courtesy Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology.

References

[1] Lingard, H., et al, 2015, ‘Utilising workers’ tacit health and safety knowledge to produce inherently safer work processes: an evaluation of the CodeSafe system’, rics.org/cobra2015, pp. 1-2.

[2] Lingard, H., 25 March 2016, ‘Construction workers safer when they ditch the safety manual: study’, The Conversation, viewed on 27 May 2016, <https://theconversation.com/construction-workers-safer-when-they-ditch-the-manual-study-55761>.

[3] Lingard, H., Edirisinghe, R., and Harley, J. 2015, ‘Using digital technology to share health and safety knowledge: An evaluation of the CodeSafe system’, Centre for Construction Work Health and Safety Research, RMIT University, p. 33.

[4] Ibid, p. 35.

[5] Axonify, 6 March 2015, ‘Walmart asks: have you Axonified today?’, viewed 30 May 2015, <http://www.axonify.com/walmart-asks-have-you-axonified-today/>.

[6] Grovo, ‘Small steps to big wins: How microlearning transforms organizations’, White Paper, viewed on 30 May 2016, <http://a1.grovo.com/asset/whitepapers/Grovo-SmallStepsBigWins-Microlearning.pdf>.

[7] Black, L., Skilled Up, 21 October 2015, ‘Microlearning: Solving Employee’s shrinking attention spans’, viewed on 30 May 2016, <http://talkbusiness.net/2014/03/gaming-software-helps-walmart-logistics-improve-safety-education-culture/#.VeNSXvlVikq>.