Your employees recently took your training course on slips, trips, and falls, so now you can report that your company is keeping employees safe. But, did your employees’ behavior change, and did you really reduce the number of accidents?

Training someone AND changing their performance is difficult to accomplish but can solidify a strong safety culture. We’ll breakdown 3 simple learning principles that will make your training courses more interesting to your employees.

Know Your Employees and How They Learn

For employees to master crucial knowledge, make sure the information is delivered in a way that’s relevant to them. Ask yourself some questions about WHO you are trying to reach.

The answers to these questions can guide your curriculum design by taking into account how your employees learn best. A self-guided computer-based training with lots of slides to read will pose a challenge to anyone who isn’t a strong reader or isn’t comfortable working on a computer. Would your employees benefit from face-to-face training meetings or audio recordings in your workers’ native languages?

Understanding your employees will inform your approach and strategy for teaching them. A course made for new or inexperienced employees won’t be engaging for a more advanced employee. However, having that senior employee engage with newer employees may work well for both parties. Another option is to moderate a safety discussion to foster organic mentoring and learning opportunities. This last idea is a type of learning style, called blended learning, which combines one type of training course with another method.

Blended Learning

Your employees received general, or initial, knowledge when they took that course on slips, trips, and falls. Blended learning takes that general knowledge and uses additional method(s) to foster behavior change that will stick.

Blended learning is helpful when you can’t make basic generalizations about your employees’ overall learning styles. You’ll increase the odds that you can reach everyone more effectively if you make the crucial information available in different ways.

Consider having your employees’ practice what they learned and talk about what they’ve learned. Maybe the onsite-instructor has employees show them where caution signs are kept at the facility or tests employees’ knowledge with staged examples that employees should come in and fix. Using real-world examples or scenarios that would happen to an employee increases the chances the employee will remember information that directly applies to them.

Repeat, Without Being Boring

How often do you take that course on slips, trips, and falls? Once a year? How much do you remember information like that from year to year? Repetition is one of the core principles of learning. If you repeat the training information throughout the year but don’t do the same thing over and over, they’re more likely to remember it.

Think about what you can do throughout the year, in-between your annual training. Would sporadic, announced site visits be helpful? What about a pop quiz? The more you engage your employees, the more likely your employees will be to change their behavior at an unconscious level.

Knowing your employees, how to engage them with real-world examples, and repeating the lessons learned, are three basic principles to create conscious and subconscious employee behavior change and build a safer workplace culture.

KPA’s award-winning training team has developed an extensive library of training courses to meet the needs of our clients. Find out if we have training programs that meet your needs.