Introducing Online Safety Training in the Workplace

Injuries and accidents cost the global economy an estimated $1.25 trillion annually. In the U.S., businesses spend well over $170 billion yearly on costs associated with job-related injuries and accidents. That’s a lot of money, however you slice it. But the actual expenses for workplace mishaps don’t stop there. Injuries and accidents also boost retraining fees, absenteeism, and faulty products and services, while decreasing productivity, efficiency, and morale. In fact, when you calculate all the costs for workplace mishaps, the numbers are staggering—and we haven’t even talked about the financial impact on employees. This is why online safety training is so important.

For businesses, the costs of workplace injuries and accidents come directly out of their profits. Sometimes, company’s compensation costs can be the difference between running in the red or operating in the black for the year. Other times, they can even be the difference between a company surviving or failing. But progressive organizations that create effective online safety training can reduce compensation costs from 20 to 40 percent. They can also increase productivity, boost product or service quality, and operate more efficiently. Together, these things increase profits.

Safety Training Is Critical

Safety training plays a pivotal role in preventing workplace injuries and accidents. When combined with effective written, behavioral, and hazard analysis programs, safety training can cut workplace accidents and injuries dramatically. In fact, safety training is among the most critical aspects of modern businesses, so organizations need to get it right. But implementing an effective safety training program is a challenge—especially for companies in the construction, mining, energy, and utility industries. They tend to use more contractors and temporary employees than other industries. These workers are weak links in many organizations’ safety programs.

To keep up with constantly shifting work environments, safety managers must beat new challenges and roadblocks when it comes to safety training. They must also adopt new digital models and delivery methods to track and train workers to create a safety culture within an organization. Doing so cuts insurance premiums, enhances company’s reputation, increases productivity, and reduces absences. It also provides legal protection against damages. Below we explore the key challenges and roadblocks safety managers face when trying to create a safety culture within a modern organization using all the advanced technology at their disposal.

Benefits of Online Safety Training

The amount of online safety training provided by companies will continue to increase as more and more companies learn of its benefits and familiarize themselves with the new digital delivery solutions. Below are seven key benefits that online safety training provides:

1. Boosts accountability, responsibility, and tracking — Online safety training programs can not only notify employees of their training sessions but also update them (and their managers) on their completion status. Notification makes employees accountable and responsible for completing their training assignments. Companies can also track and report on employees’ efforts easier.
2. Standardizes safety training — Delivering consistent training to hard hat employees is a challenge just in itself. Adding in the problem of contract workers increases that challenge ten-fold. Online learning makes it easy to deliver the same training messages to all, regardless of their shifts or their job sites.
3. Improves safety training effectiveness — Online safety training boosts training effectiveness because it not only increases worker engagement but also offers more practice opportunities and presents more chances to evaluate one’s learning efforts through practice questions and feedback. Plus, online training provides more testing opportunities, which helps boost comprehension.
4. Lowers training costs — Online safety training cuts costs several ways. For one thing, it lessens the need to hold training sessions in an instructor-led, classroom-style delivery method. For another, it reduces the costs of things like lodging, overtime, renting training equipment, and training administration.
5. Boosts worker productivity — Since you’re not dragging workers off job sites on your schedule, you’re not cutting into the on-the-job productivity of either contractors or full-time employees. Plus, it makes workers feel that they’re more in charge of their work schedules, something they appreciate.
6. Enhances employee morale — Investing in online safety training is something employees notice. They also appreciate it and tend to take a more active role in a company’s safety culture, benefiting both them and the company.
7. Compresses learning time — Conducting safety training using traditional training methods involves written materials, face-to-face meetings, and instructor-led classroom visits—all of which eats up learning time. But online safety training compresses both the total amount of time the average employee needs to complete the training and the time required to move the worker through the training cycle.

Boosting User Adoption of Online Safety Training

Successfully introducing online safety training at an organization means realizing that there’s a process involved. It also means realizing that the effort is as much a change management project as a training project. Even if companies have the right technology and the right strategy, they must confront the change management issues to successfully introduce online training. They also need to create a “safe environment” where users can try things out, one that’s close enough to real life that user confidence grows with each experience. That takes time and effort.

Below are five proven tips on how to boost user adoption of online safety training:

1. Organize learning content logically — The central idea of online training is to help people do their jobs better and to avoid injuries and accidents. In addition to organizing content by topic, try organizing content by workers’ roles at a workplace or by locations, if you have more than one site. In other words, make it easy. After all, isn’t the idea of training to help employees do their jobs better?
2. Choose simplicity over complexity — The technology you choose to use will play a big part in getting users to adopt your online training program. So, whenever you have a choice, opt for easy-to-use technology tools that are user friendly and simple to use. Bringing in cumbersome, complicated technology tools that are hard to learn and use will only generate worker resistance, no matter how many bells and whistles the tools have. They may even prevent the program from gaining traction with workers.
3. Create a sense of urgency — Creating a sense of urgency for an internal initiative is a must. It’s also among the biggest challenges companies will face when introducing online training. Employees need to know why the change is being made. Too often, changes are thrust upon employees without establishing a business use case. Companies need to define a business case that establishes the overall context. Otherwise, employees will push back and resist the change at all costs.
4. Identify and support evangelists — Every company has employees with a knack for learning new technologies. Use them as evangelists. Get them involved early and use them to help you spread the word. It will convince other employees to try the new technology. Also, let them help with training and coaching when you roll the technology out to the whole company.
5. Celebrate early “wins”— Nothing succeeds like success. So, make sure you highlight the early “wins” made by the use of the online safety training, such as milestones in the number of workers who used online training or the improvements in safety. These wins will be different for every company. Promoting your wins helps others get a sense of the value that online training brings to the table. These wins aren’t always obvious to everyone but their effects might be felt by many others.

Conclusion

Online safety training provides numerous benefits, including boosting accountability, responsibility, and tracking, shortening learning time, and enhancing employee morale. But to generate these benefits, companies must overcome the challenges and roadblocks that this digital delivery method presents, while developing an eLearning culture within the organization. Using the tips and tactics presented in this article will help companies achieve these goals and reduce the staggering costs of work-related accidents and injuries. The key is remembering that the organization is dealing with both a training exercise and a change management project.