Employee safety training is important in many industries, but it’s especially important in construction, where employees deal with heavy machinery and a diversity of external hazards on a daily basis. The problem is employees don’t always do a great job of paying attention or remembering their training, rendering even the best lectures and courses ineffective.
How can you make employee safety training easier to remember and more consistently applied?
Try Microlearning
Microlearning is a relatively new concept that focuses on conveying concise, bite-sized chunks of information that are then immediately applied. Instead of pulling all your employees together for a two-hour seminar covering dozens of different topics and hoping those employees remember everything well enough to apply it on the job site, you’ll be dispensing little nuggets of information only as needed.
There are several advantages to this approach:
- Short attention requirements.
When people are forced to learn something over the course of hours, or even days, they tend to get fatigued. It’s not even a problem of short attention spans; it’s a problem of being overwhelmed. You can test this effect for yourself. Try to memorize a string of 21 digits, in order, as quickly as possible. Then try the same exercise, but only work on remembering chunks of 3 digits at a time. The latter approach might require more cycles of learning, but you’ll end up memorizing the entire string of digits much faster and more reliably.
- Immediate relevance and application.
This approach is also good for demonstrating immediate relevance and applicability. You can show your employees, in real time, why this bit of information is important, and you can get them to apply it so they can put it into practice immediately.
- Opportunities for immediate feedback.
Supervisors also love micro learning because it provides opportunities for immediate feedback. An employee gains new information, tries to apply that information, and then has an opportunity to work directly with an instructor if they got anything wrong. This immediate incorporation of feedback instantly makes the new knowledge more memorable as well as more accurate.
Hire the Right Trainers
You can also make employee safety training easier to remember by hiring and supporting the right types of trainers. Different people have different teaching styles, and some are better communicators than others. If you hire only the best communicators and the most supportive teachers, you’ll have a much easier job getting information to the right people in the right ways.
Incorporate Humor (and Keep Things Light)
People remember funny things better than non-funny things. That doesn’t mean you have to turn your safety standards into an absolute joke; it just means that cracking a few one-liners and keeping the tone light is going to encourage better memory among your employees. This is also good for building camaraderie, establishing a relatively friendly tone and encouraging supportive collaboration between teammates.
Cater to Different Learning Styles
It’s important to remember that not every employee is going to learn, or remember, in the same ways or using the same techniques. A teaching approach that works for one person might fall totally flat for another. For example, some people are very visual learners, and they can pick up new instructions quickly if they’re offered a demonstration. But other people are more practical learners, and they find it almost impossible to learn new things without actually putting the information into practice.
Your trainers and educators should be adaptable, and capable of integrating multiple teaching techniques to cater to people with different learning styles.
Use Catchy Phrases and Mnemonic Devices
Mnemonic devices are a technique designed to encode information to make it easier to remember, and catchy phrases themselves tend to be far more memorable than unpackaged, messier styles of information conveyance. A phrase like, “’L’ is for Lifting – Lift with your Legs and Leave your back out of it,” is much easier to remember than a complicated series of images showcasing what happens when you lift with your back.
You may find it hard to come up with some of these on the fly or by yourself, but over time, you’ll learn, acquire, and develop catchy phrases that you can continue using indefinitely in the future.
Offer Incentives
Finally, consider encouraging memorability by offering incentives for people who quickly learn, follow, and integrate their safety training. Verbal praise, gift cards, and extra time off could help motivate people who might otherwise zone out when receiving safety instructions.
Employee safety training is one of the most important elements of your construction business, since it’s the foundation that keeps employees safe and keeps your expenses low. If you make a concentrated effort to improve the memorability of your safety training, both your employees and your business overall will benefit.
