WHOLE NEW WORLD OF
SAFETY TRAINING Laura Valic
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 textheavy 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.
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n 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]
14 SAFETY SOLUTIONS - JUNE/JULY 2016
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
www.SafetySolutions.net.au