Aisling Miller, head of product – training and learning at EcoOnline, asks: where are we going wrong with health and safety training at work?
From asbestos handling to electrical safety, a wealth of e-learning, classroom and on-the-job training is available today to help organisations to protect their employees.
Yet research reveals the extent to which traditional OSH training fails to achieve the desired outcomes. For example, manual handling training is widely provided, and yet 8.9 million days are lost because of work-related musculoskeletal disorders in 2019/20 (GB Health and Safety Executive, 2021). Clearly, there is room for improvement. Where are we going wrong with workplace OSH training?
Here are four key areas of OSH training that need rethinking:
1. Required competences need to be better understood
In a recent webinar hosted by IOSH, Rethinking workplace OSH training and learning, there were a lot of questions from the audience about competence: measurement, maintenance, the roles of training and experiences, lack of assessment and more.
Perhaps our biggest faux pas is thinking that training is synonymous with competence. They are not the same thing. Simply training someone will not make them competent, so we need to think differently about this.
To give you an analogy, we all know someone who has completed their driving lessons and passed their driving test but is not a safe or competent driver. A speed awareness course, focusing on attitude and mindset, might be required to bring a person’s competence up to the required level for safety on the roads.
Remember that competence isn’t binary – black and white, good or bad. You need to take a graded approach to bring individuals into line on the agreed level of competence required.
It helps to view workplace OSH training as a journey in which the end goal is competence. Training, learning and experience of a skill-set will make your OSH training more effective.
2. Strategy and robust admin tools are needed
To be effective, OSH training should be viewed more strategically. It is important to follow a cycle of preparation, delivery, transfer and measurement over time. Today, organisations aspire to track the outcomes of training through pre- and post-metrics such as accidents, increased productivity, sick days and staff engagement levels. This degree of strategic planning, execution and data gathering requires robust, professional admin tools.
Organisations have long relied on Excel spreadsheets to manage data about OSH training participation, delivery and outcomes. Although spreadsheets undoubtedly have their merits, they are only as good as the people maintaining them, and flaws, errors and gaps often creep in. You must consider issues such as people leaving the organisation and their replacement not understanding how to manage the existing data files, or how to find vital information.
When training planning and delivery documents are managed with dynamic software, the management of data becomes more reliable and sustainable, with systems embedded across the organisation, rather than siloed as the domain of one person.
Fortunately, there are now excellent programmes, often delivered as Software as a Service, which overcome the problem of organisational memory loss.
3. Tech should not be the default method of delivery
Although technology doesn’t revolutionise how we learn, it can revolutionise the way we are taught. Today we can learn through apps such as Duolingo and Udemy, or by listening to podcasts or attending on-demand workshops.
These new tech learning tools and methodologies are increasingly being harnessed for OSH training, improving accessibility and allowing employees to fit sessions more conveniently into their working day.
However, I worry that some tech advances risk creating new barriers. For example, VR headsets can cause motion sickness for some people, or line workers might not have access to a work computer for their e-learning – meaning that accessibility is denied. My advice is to research delivery methodology very carefully, and ‘lead with the need’, not by simply adopting the latest tech on the market.
4. Be more creative with learning tools – mix and match
The OSH training needed within an organisation will depend on roles and responsibilities in the management plan, health and safety policies, legal requirements and board-level ambitions for staff wellbeing. It is important that the outcomes stated by external training specialists or e-learning packages match the competences required.
One danger is that, although HR departments and supervisors can benefit from a vast choice of OSH e-learning and off-the-shelf options, the resources might not be enough to achieve the desired outcome. In my experience of OSH training, I’ve seen excellent outcomes when there is a healthy level of mixing and matching, in terms of different tools being supplied from different agencies and sources to make up the full toolkit.
There’s nothing to stop you combining a couple of safety awareness courses into a single session, for example, complemented by your own PDFs, workplace photos or content. Most learning management systems allow for this. Tailoring training to your business’s specific needs will help to ensure relevance and drive up engagement, which is so vital for embedded learning.
References
GB Health and Safety Executive. (2021) Working days lost in Great Britain, 2021.
Image credit | iStock