Well Designed Training Makes a Difference

Your organisation must ensure that your training makes a difference.

After all, you spend considerable time and money on this endeavour.

It begins with your new employee inductions and onboarding, where evidence of understanding ensures you have met your initial compliance obligations.

The next month or so is often used to educate on critical risk areas around your organisation’s work.

It continues throughout the employee life cycle, where you focus on increasing their skills and protecting them from injury. These topics might be informed by injuries or near-miss data.

Annual refreshers are needed to continue meeting your compliance obligations and to ensure ongoing understanding of critical risks.

Here, systems come to the fore to manage and track your training efforts and to provide reporting evidence.

In this article, we look at how to streamline your induction training while maintaining compliance, design effective training to ensure that your training makes a difference, and manage and organise your training using effective systems.

Inductions and Onboarding

Typically, induction and onboarding training begins with introducing the new employee to your organisation. It should cover the work you do and your vision, mission and values.

The role of the induction for new employees is to ensure they understand the work environment they are about to enter. The challenge is to cover all the information succinctly and thoroughly and make the training engaging so that your new employees remember the key facts. In short, aim to provide induction training that makes a difference, rather than regurittated, outdated powerpoint presentations that drone on for hours. Keep it short and succinct, and consider interactive and varied delivery methods.

Here is a list of the main areas that your induction should cover, and generally, this is where you would begin. You must

• Inform your new employees about the hazards and risks in their workplace
• Link to your organisation’s health and safety policies and procedures and achieve a sign-off that they have read and understood them
• Emphasise the importance of safe work practices in the work that they do and their responsibility to keep themselves and others safe
• Stress the responsibility your employees have in reducing incidents and accidents
• Present your workplace’s rules about smoking, breaks, your code of conduct and fitness for work
• Outline the procedures for reporting incidents, injuries and near misses
• Instruct about the evacuation and emergency procedures for your workplace, including emergency exits, evacuation instructions, assembly points and the use of fire alarms and fire fighting equipment
• Inform your employees about first aid and other emergency contacts
• Provide information on your Employee Assistance Program and where your employees can seek help for mental health concerns
• Train your employees on workplace bullying and sexual harassment and how to respectfully interact with others
• Inform your employees of the types of Personal Protective Equipment they will need to perform their work.

Read our article, How to Create a Safety Induction That Trains and Meets Compliance.

Creating an Engaging Induction

It’s no good if you spend hours and hours developing your induction training content, packed full of information, if your new employees are drifting off after the first ten minutes. The problem you have is that so many organisations’ inductions are so similar that your new employees often feel they’ve seen and done all of this before. Their only thought is, “How can I get through this as quickly as possible?” when the whole purpose of your induction is to prepare them to work for you.

There are some things you can do to ensure your training makes a difference by creating an engaging induction, including:

1. Use lots of visuals. Try to avoid heavy text-based training because it’s difficult to read and absorb the information, especially if your employees have literacy issues. Instead, use visuals such as videos, photos, diagrams and charts to portray the message wherever you can.
2. Tell stories. Wrapping the information in stories and metaphors helps provide lived experience and an emotional connection to information. When we emotionally connect to something, we remember the message.
3. Use positive language.  Your new employees are just starting work with you, and you need your safety induction to be a positive experience. Try to tell them what they can do, rather than what they can’t.
4. Try participative learning methods. Too often, safety inductions are passive learning experiences. If you are training in the classroom, try to use active demonstrations and ask your new employees to have a try themselves where you can.  Ask them about their own experiences and how they relate to the training.  If you are training online, you can create an engaging safety induction by using gaming techniques with puzzles, games and quizzes.
5. Use robust assessments. Your induction must have a robust assessment that is not just multiple choice where you choose 3 out of 4 of the answers or “All of the Above”. Using these types of tests sends a message that the training is not valued or important to your company. Try to mix up your assessment to include a variety of quiz formats because this will improve message recall and retention.
6. Keep your training succinct. Shorter training delivery is not a sin, and it doesn’t mean that you don’t cover all that you need. Too often, we see inductions crammed full of information to make the organisation look good. Invariably, short, sharp deliveries that get to the point and deliver critical information usually result in better learning retention.

Read our article, 6 Reasons to Use MicroLearning to Train Safety.

Training in the First Months and Beyond

Ok, so your new employee has started work, and now you need to plan the first couple of months of training to complete their onboarding. However, you need them to work to provide a return on your investment and training activities take them away from that. It’s a balancing act. How can you do this efficiently and effectively to ensure your training makes a difference?

Video, microlearning, and short courses are one way to keep your messaging constant while your new employee gets to work. Regular and repetitive training ensures skills are acquired and maintained.

A study published in the Review of Educational Research found that learning through video is more effective than in-person learning. This is why 74% of trainers in 2,000 companies use video as part of their training strategies.

Corporate training needs to engage employees for better retention of the information. Moreover, slide decks have lost their appeal, and many studies have proven that video learning has a better impact on education.

Read our article, Make Your Workplace Safety Training Impactful.

Developing Your Employees’ Skills

Your new employee is a superstar, and you want to provide training to increase their skills. You can see their potential as a supervisor; however, although they’re great with the tools, they lack the soft skills you need them to have to successfully manage people. How can you offer training that makes a difference in these areas to bring them up to speed quickly?

There are several things that a Supervisor needs to do, including ensuring that they have open channels of communication. They must be able to communicate up and down the line to those they report to and those they supervise.

A supervisor must also make sure that those they supervise know the exact results that are expected of them. Their teams need to know the objectives of their workgroup and their specific job.

Also, they need to know the tasks they must perform. The team must understand the priority of their tasks and the quality and quantity of standards that apply to the work.

And, they should be aware of the result of these tasks and the deadlines, time frames or close-offs that apply. Most importantly, the supervisor needs to give clear directions.

Once again, short bursts of training are effective in upskilling your employees to develop their supervisory skills.

Read our article, The Critical Role of a Supervisor.

How Can You Support Your Supervisors?

Supporting supervisors in their roles and building their capacity is an important component of solutions to protect workers, especially in high-risk workplaces where it’s challenging to remove hazards. Organisations need to:

• Provide training interventions around supervisory leadership and relationship management skills. Ensure your training makes a difference to develop skills such as active listening, assertiveness, paraphrasing, reflecting, conflict analysis, coaching and mediation. Extend the supervisory role to advising, coaching and nurturing, and not simply disciplining.
• Support supervisors to make the difficult decisions they make daily. Lead from the top, where bullying, intimidation and disrespectful communications are not tolerated. Give them room to do their jobs, make mistakes, and learn.
• Actively demonstrate that supervisors are highly valued members of the workforce who perform an essential function in managing workplace relationships.
• Ensure supervisor job descriptions are comprehensive with clear expectations.
• Ensure there are clear policies, procedures and systems.

Read our article, Do Supervisor’s Leadership Behaviours Impact Safety?

Choosing the Right Training System

Whether you have a learning management system or are looking for one, the TIS Training Platform and LMS is a great option.

The Platform has over 200 courses available in multiple languages, including Australian English, for safety, compliance, supervisors, HR, etc. All our clients have access to the entire library as part of their subscription.

You can access our courses using the TIS Learning Management System or in SCORM format to play on your LMS.

We also develop customised safety inductions and build custom courses. We can attach your policies, procedures and other documents for acknowledgement that flows into our reporting.

Finally, we continue to be a world-leading interactive training platform based on Adult Learning Principles designed to improve learner engagement, completion rates, and knowledge retention. Our focus is on self-paced game-like microlearning using either a PC, tablet or phone.

Take a look at our website to see what we offer! You’ll be pleasantly surprised by our pricing, reporting, customisation and integration capabilities.