Workplace safety habits are successfully taught through microlearning technology. How?

Let’s face it, you would never want to be in charge or in the company of workers who fail to understand their workplace safety training. And you likely expect the protocols and ethics behind this training to be second nature to workers. However, not only does conventional training fail to meaningfully reinforce attitudes and behaviors, but it misses the mark when it comes time to put learning into practice. 

This means that training teams are wasting time and money creating content that essentially goes in one ear and out the other. Plus, a failure to learn and implement workplace safety practices can put employees, revenues, customers and the company’s own reputation at stake. The foundation for any professional business is to maintain a positive brand reputation: a brand reputation that is largely influenced by workers and their ability to implement workplace safety measures. Plus, your ability to grow your customer base and attract top talent hinges on how your band is perceived.

Organizations host informative yet lengthy workplace safety training courses and although such resources convey detailed instructions, they do not always resonate with workers. In fact, according to the science of the forgetting curve, around 79% of what is taught in compliance training cannot be recalled. And since most workplace safety programs are one-and-done, what does that mean down the road when employees need to be safe and follow procedures they learned months or even years prior? Will they remember? 

This also begs the question, who is liable for the consequences when an event threatening workplace safety does occur? The employer or the employee? Workers should know how to navigate a fire emergency, understand  how to mitigate and deal with an instance of workplace violence, and how to use equipment in the facility safely. Plus, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced even more safety protocols and related information for workers to digest. 

A solid understanding of all these safety measures is a lot to ask, especially since science tells us that workers fail to recall most of the information from their workplace safety and health training. 

Still, it’s more important than ever that employees understand safety protocols to safeguard a company’s brand, workforce and customers. So, how can companies ensure their workers properly comprehend and apply the information they learn to real-life scenarios and abide by proper safety protocols? The answer is microlearning technology.

Microlearning technology not only reinforces fundamental information but also changes behavior by offering an end-to-end learning process that helps organizations teach and reinforce workplace safety matters continuously. By encouraging intuitive behavior when it comes to workplace safety, worker confidence is strengthened and risk is mitigated.

Microlearning technology for workplace safety compliance training

As previously mentioned, most of the information in conventional compliance training cannot be recalled by workers due to the forgetting curve. That means that all of the resources L&D teams put into training content is often undermined by the human instinct to forget lengthy information taught during traditional learning courses. Microlearning technology works to combat this problem. 

Microlearning uses a spaced learning approach and scenario-based assessments to reinforce and promote long-term retention of critical information and to ensure that that information is recalled and applied in real-world situations.

Quick and convenient assessments are sent straight to learners’ email or mobile devices every few days. The questions asked can be answered in a matter of seconds and keep information top of mind without disrupting employees’ flow of work.

Once a question is answered, the learner receives immediate feedback. If they answered the question correctly, they see their leaderboard score go up and get that instant gratification. If they answer incorrectly, they receive a brief explanation of the correct response and will be asked the same question again at a later date to confirm understanding. 

Managers and executives must be able to understand the gaps in their workforce’s knowledge, especially when it comes to ensuring workplace safety. With Qstream, managers can see how their team is performing across Qstreams and identify coaching opportunities via the analytics dashboard.

Microlearning technology assesses both the weak and strong points of a worker’s comprehension of related information; this optimizes overall efficiency and helps detect prominent patterns in worker learning. Moreover, microlearning technology gathers workers’ performance on assessments, giving managers and executives strong proficiency data at scale for performance support. This enables managers and executives to analyze worker performance at the individual, team, departmental and regional level, so they can instruct them on the floor.

Armed with this data, managers and executives can work with learners to ensure key concepts and protocols are both understood and practiced.  They can then be confident that their employees will adhere to workplace safety processes on the job, which is critical to employee well-being and an organization’s integrity.

Ready to see microlearning technology in action for your next workplace safety training program? Request a demo with Qstream.