In a recent online discussion with safety professionals from around the world, we discussed what types of visuals they use during their safety presentation training.

These visuals fell into a few different categories:

1. Shock photos (that often include death and lots of blood, to ‘scare’ workers into being safe),
2. Incorrect safety photos (that showed staff doing the wrong things),
3. Correct safety procedure photos (that show the right behaviour), and
4. Happy families and people (to show that being safe leads to a happy future).

Any of these types of photos can work.  The only exception was that the group felt that showing incorrect safety procedures can be a sensitive issue in companies and was not recommended.

The reasons why these types of photos work can be found in the book  Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath.   It was stated that when people make choices they rely on two basic models – consequences and identity.

Should I or Shouldn’t I?

The consequences model is well known among economic students.

It assumes that when we have a decision to make, we weigh the costs and benefits of our options and make the choice that increases our satisfaction.  It’s a very rational and analytical approach.  It’s all about choosing the option that gives us the best value.

This is when we use photos that “shock” the person into safety by showing the result of an accident that could happen to them.  It tries to appeal to their self-interest.  Or we show the right way of doing a procedure.

With the identity model, however, people make decisions based on what they believe the person who they are would make the decision.  They ask themselves “what would someone like me do in this kind of situation?”

With identity, this is getting people to think about a decision in terms of how it effects them through their group association. So it’s getting people to make decisions about about person they aspire to be (or who they already believe they are and how that person would make the decision (group affiliation includes race, religion, gender, class, occupation and countless other groups).  For example: scientists would make decisions on how a scientist is meant to make decisions by gathering lots of facts and making an objective decision). This is when you show people what they want to be (ie: safe and happy families) according to which group they believe they belong to.

Encouraging group identity is important for any company.  It’s all about your culture and getting your staff to align with your core values.  Consider fostering a group identity that encourages looking after your mates, being a safe worker or doing things in a way that only special people can that work for your company (eg: IBMers have their own name and use their core values when making decisions).  Then, you can use visuals that match group identity.

Which type of visuals do you like to use in your safety communication?

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Training videos are a great way to get your important training messages instantly understood by your new starters, current staff and contractors.

However, most training videos miss the mark when it comes to aligning new staff with their core values and vision, as well as engaging new starters.

New employees are at their most teachable when they first start a job.  This is an opportune time to explain the culture of the company, the type of work and outcomes that are expected and the company attitude towards safety.

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, claims that what stood great companies apart from good companies was how deeply and consistently staff at the company lived, breathed and expressed the core values.  At their best, core values give workers a framework for making the right decision that benefits the company.  Safety excellent companies lead by their values than by rules.  Rather than forced compliance, they lead by shared ownership of values whereby staff are empowered to make decisions.

In addition, senior leadership play an important role in establishing the culture of the company, including the safety culture.  Safety excellent companies let new staff know from day one the importance of safety as they know that poor inductions undervalue the importance of safety.

Based on the information that makes good companies great, here are some key concepts that you need to include in your workplace training videos:

1. Demonstrate your core values – Talk about each of your core values and discuss what they mean and how they work.  Why are they important?  Give examples of how staff use the core values to make decisions that are right for the company.
2. Get senior leaders to introduce the video – Senior leaders are crucial in aligning staff with the goals, vision and core values.  Film your senior leader welcoming new starters, explaining the need for the video, what they will learn, what the company is about, what’s important etc.  Senior leaders are often travelling and out of the office, but having them chat in a friendly way to camera, makes them seem more approachable (and real).
3. Tell stories – Stories provide an emotional connection to information and provide a framework for staff to understand what is acceptable company behaviour and what is not.  They are ideal to use when giving examples of staff doing the right thing, working hard to reach a goal and working together as a team.  Work out which stories to use in your company in the article How to find the right stories for your Company.
4. Use animations – Animations can go where trainees can’t go.  They are perfect for showing how the body works and how it can get affected poor lifting techniques and stress.
5. Credible spokespeople – Customers, clients and patients are surprisingly more effective in motivating people to work harder, smarter and more productively.  Getting your end users to talk about how your products and services have helped them is a proven way to motivate staff.
6. Use quizzes – Quiz your learners after (or during) the video training. This makes sure they have absorbed the information.  Use a quiz as a review tool. This is a great way to refresh staff.  Even if they only watch a small segment of an induction training video (for example: warm up exercises, by undertaking a small quiz on this topic, you know that they have learnt the information).  Interestingly, research studies point to high levels of recall and understanding of video, provided that viewers were told they were going to be tested before watching the video.
7. Include face to face time – Often, companies think because they have a training video they do not need a trainer to go through the information.  This is a mistake.  It’s still important to include face to face time so that the trainee can ask questions and get feedback on any tasks they are practising.  Mind you, the face to face time will be sufficiently reduced, but it needs to be enough so that the trainee can engage more with the material.  One good training methodology is to use the video as the main form of training (as opposed to a PowerPoint presentation) while a trainer moves progressively through the information, stopping to talk about the different topics.  Done well, this can ensure consistent training across the company.

Spending the time developing the right content strategy for your training video will ensure it has longevity and that it is a highly effective training tool for your company.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Think training videos are all about bad hair and music?

Find out the science behind why training videos are so effective and why every company needs to use them in workplace training.

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Research has found that the most engaging methods of safety training are, on average, approximately three times more effective than the least engaging methods in promoting knowledge and skill acquisition, as well as reducing accidents, illnesses, and injuries.

Given the cost of workplace accidents to a company, getting your safety training right can save millions of dollars.

Dr Ian Woods, from AMP Capital Investors says that the average workplace injury costs 6 percent of profit.   While in the construction industry, the total workplace injury cost is equivalent to a staggering 98 percent of the industry’s operating profit.

These high cost effects a company’s ability to be competitive.  A good OHS strategy  is necessary to prevent accidents in the workplace and improving OHS safety is now a necessity not a nice-to-have.

So how do you make safety training more effective?

Training can be either passive/low engagement (eg: lectures and reading which are the least engaging) to active/high engagement (eg: watching a training video with a quiz, hands-on demonstrations).

Here are the four tips to an engaging safety training program:

1. Visuals - The trainee receives classroom style training with high impact visuals.  83% of human learning occurs through visuals.  The right brain prefers visuals and it is believed that it can process pictures much faster, even hundreds of times faster, than the verbal brain can process words.  The application of more interesting visuals such as diagrams, video and pictures can have enormous positive impact on learning.

1. Assessment - the trainee is assessed on the information they have learned and face to face feedback is given on their results.  It is important that a person gives the feedback (not a computer).

1. Development of training in stages – this means that the trainee receives different standards of training before starts job (basic), then on-the-job training that changes to suit the increasing knowledge of the trainee.  The training can get more complicated as the trainee understands more.

1. Behavioral modelling - this is integral to an active learning style.  A buddy or trainer demonstrates a particular task, then lets the trainee undertake it.  Coaching is then given as to how to improve.  However, it is important that the buddy is good at their job and will teach procedures correctly.

Action-focused feedback is regarded as the key to knowledge acquisition, in that it forces the trainee to work out relationships between events and actions, leading to development of strategies for handling unforeseen events.

And while classroom training is the a passive form of training it can be used effectively if it includes:

• High impact visuals
• Quizzes (with one on one feedback).

Once information is imparted in classroom training, hands-on demonstrations are also required both in the class and when the new starter is on the job.

By incorporating more engaging, hands-on training into your learning design, it will ensure that workers get more meaning and understanding from their safety training.

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According to Wikipedia, advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience  to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals, or services.  Advertising can change the values, attitudes, and actions of those who see or hear the message.

Think television commercials.  Advertising is a billion dollar industry focused on changing consumers’ habits and beliefs.   And while it is true that television might not be as effective as it used to be, this is only because fewer people are watching it now.  Nevertheless, Government organisations like WorkSafe and VicRoads have used television commercials to successfully change our behaviours and attitudes towards workplace safety and road safety respectively.

In order to market safety messages, it’s time that safety professionals started to think like marketers.  And this might be hard, as let’s face it, they are a strange group to more linear thinkers like engineers.  However, let’s put on our marketing caps and find out how they try to get into our brain.

Key advertising tactics to consider for marketing safety are:

• Consistent, clear messaging (includes branding) – Always promote the same standarized safety message and ensure that all departments are aligned with the message and do not send out conflicting information (eg: safety officer tells people to work safely and cautiously, but production manager pushes for speed).

• Consequences of poor safety – One of they key messages is to get employees really understand that poor safety behaviour puts their health and safety at risk, but also other employees, contractors and customers.  Let them know what effect this will have on the personal life and how it will effect their family.

• Multiple message placement – This means you have a consistent safety message or theme and you repeat it in multiple places.  It is like the glue that holds these tactics together and is essential in successful advertising.  In advertising campaigns, it is believed that people need to be exposed to a television ad six times before they will absorb the message.  This is why frequency of message equals success in the advertising campaign.

Most safety training programs fall short when it comes to frequency of message. Yet, there are many simple and cost effective ways to do this.

By getting workers to engage in your safety message in different ways (watching it, hearing it, reading it), supervisors can better ensure that more workers receive it.  Different communication methods include a training video that is supplemented with matching posters, email newsletter campaigns, key rings, employee handbooks and toolbox talks.

But how do you develop workplace safety communication?  Read How to Develop a Workplace Safety Messages Campaign (Part 2)

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Induction training is absolutely vital for new employees.   It is also the time when new starters are thirsty to know more about their new workplace and want to quickly integrate into their new team.   However, it can be difficult to know how well a new starter or contractor has absorbed training information.

Establish an induction training evaluation system

According to Joe Huang from Wondershare, makers of the Quiz Creator, as with any type of training, it is important to review and seek feedback before, after and during induction training.  The evaluation of induction training can be divided into three stages:

1. Evaluating new employees’ learning and academic performance. Before new employees start with you, you can quiz them on their knowledge.  This can be determined through examinations: paper-based tests are usually the most common way, but for the sake of time-saving and cost-effective, computer-based tests are the best choice.
2. Evaluating the appropriateness of the training course content.  For companies who are not sure about the content in their training and how new employees feel about it, you can quiz new starters to find out how they found the training and what they liked/disliked.  This is a great way to update your training in a meaningful way.
3. Evaluating the work performance of trainees.  After the newbie has started, you can quiz  supervisors on certain learning outcomes, to find out what they think of the performance of the new starter, so  you can know how the new employees took their training into practice.  This is also important information when reviewing your induction training and what areas need further improvement.

How quizzes can be used with induction training video for optimal results

Research has found that viewers of a training video score better on message retention and recall levels when they are told that they will be tested.
To use quizzes properly with a training video:

1. Quiz your learners before producing the training video. By finding out what information current staff have difficulty with, you will be more knowledgeable about the type of information to put into your training video.
2. Quiz your learners after (or during) the video training. This makes sure they have absorbed the information.
3. Use a quiz as a review tool. This is a great way to refresh staff.  Even if they only watch a small segment of an induction training video (for example: warm up exercises, by undertaking a small quiz on this topic, you know that they have learnt the information).

Now, while it is all well and good to test people during induction training, we hear from many companies that this sort of e-learning approach can be flawed.  All it takes is for a dodgy supervisor to hand people the answers and everyone passes through the quiz in flying colours.

That’s why it is important when testing people that if they get it wrong, they have to go back to that section and watch the video again.  Or alternatively, the questions are randomly displayed so that it makes cheating much harder.

According to Joe Huang, it is important to choose a quiz creating software that has anti-cheating features.  This includes a time limit (so that there is no time to research answers), randomization (questions occur in different order), access control (password only access to change the test) and a concealed XML file (this stops the answers from being viewed).

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It’s smart for companies to be worried about staff and customer training videos and how to tackle them correctly.  There are so many choices.  Quite frequently, training videos are produced that just don’t get watched.  Now making the right decision has just got easier.

Melbourne, Australia (August 11, 2010) – Digicast Productions, a training video production house, today released the “Training Video Buyer’s Kit”.   Developing the right training video for your company isn’t easy.  Nor is choosing the right company to help you.  This kit is a useful resource for anyone involved in the challenging and complex task of deciding upon producing a staff or customer training video and then how to go about it.

Using a four step process the buyer kit includes:

• A list of questions to decide whether or not a training video is right for an organisation.

• The critical questions to determine what the training video needs to achieve, in order to write the brief and how to best manage the project internally.
• A valuable checklist to evaluate the suitability of a video production house.
• An additional checklist to measure the effectiveness of training videos already produced by production houses.

For a complete copy of the kit, visit http://info.digicast.com.au/things-you-need-to-know-before-buying-a-customised-training-video
About Digicast Productions

Established in 1991, Digicast is an Australian vendor of customised safety and induction training videos. Thousands of people each year worldwide are trained with Digicast training videos. For more information, visit Digicast at www.digicast.com.au or The Workplace Improver blog for training tips, www.digicast.com.au/blog.

Contact Marie-Claire Ross

Digicast Productions
+ 61 3 9696-4400
mc@digicast.com.au

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Getting Training Messages to stick can be Tricky. This New Report reveals the Key Factors behind Successful Staff Induction Training and how to implement them.

Melbourne, Australia (July 26,2010) – Digicast Productions, a safety and induction training video production house, today released a new white paper “Optimising Induction Training: Reduce Costs, Improve Quality and Talent Retention”.   Around the world, many companies train new starters and contractors ineffectively often finding it difficult to get training messages to stick inside people’s heads.  This paper outlines the impact of poor induction training, the high cost of face to face training and the growing importance of including visuals in training materials.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of human learning occurs visually, yet the majority of companies produce text based induction training materials that have a 10% effectiveness rate on recall levels.

Smart organisations who regularly need to train contractors and new staff are looking for a more streamlined, engaging and cost effective way to ensure staff absorb training messages.

This exclusive white paper addresses the various pitfalls of a poorly designed induction training process and what can be done about it.  The report looks at:
•    What current induction training programs are really costing companies
•    The importance of avoiding a poor safety culture
•    The emerging trend of using more visuals in communication
•    How to make training messages sticky
•    A little mistake that cost a Quarry $20,000 a year

For a complete copy of the whitepaper, download it now.
About Digicast Productions

Established in 1991, Digicast is an Australian vendor of customised safety and induction training videos.  Thousands of people each year worldwide are trained with Digicast training videos. For more information, visit Digicast or The Workplace Improver blog for training tips.

Contact Marie-Claire Ross
Digicast Productions
+ 61 3 9696-4400
mc@digicast.com.au

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1. Use more Visuals - 83% of human learning occurs visually.  Use lots of photos, videos, diagrams and colour to present training information.  Avoid relying heavily on text based training.  After all, we only recall 10% of what we read compared to 50% for what we both see and hear.

2. Tell Stories – During training, tell stories of exemplary staff behaviour that typify the type of action you want staff to do.  Stories help people make emotional connections.

3. Lead by Values – Let staff/contractors know what your values are.   Using values, empowers workers to make decisions based on company values.  Difficult for staff to make the right decisions if they only have rules to follow.

4. Positivise it – Remove negative language.  Tell people how you want them to behave, rather than telling them what you don’t want.  Remove words such as ‘no’, ‘can’t and ‘don’t’.

5. Involve senior management - Senior management play an integral leadership role in establishing culture.  Effective leadership whether it be concerning safety, a new sales method or business structure must be led from the top.  They must be involved in the induction process.

6. Reduce complication - Get rid of long sentences, jargon and big words in training materials.  Keep it short and tweet.

7. Ask more why questions - Teach people why they need to do something, so they can always figure out the how.  Otherwise, company processes keep getting perpetuated without people ever questioning why they do something.

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According to Steven Bell, senior associate with law firm Freehills, in January 2012 the new Australian OHS laws will expect companies to drive safety management internally and push greater alignment between key messages and action.

The new laws will introduce a level of personal responsibility that will help drive the changes needed for better OHS.  This means that senior managers will be expected to foster a positive workplace culture, receive regular safety reporting and a practical understanding of what is happening on the ground.

This is a great step forward as senior management actually drive the safety culture of a company.

Currently, most companies promote a safety culture, but send out mixed messages when it comes to a safe workplace.  For example: A fairly standard grumble by many workers is that they are expected to work safely, yet at the same time they are told to work faster or in a way that involves safety risks, to drive productivity.

So with the new requirement to promote safety messages and show evidence of a positive safety culture, what is the best way to communicate workplace safety messages?

With any communication program, it is important to take into account that people absorb messages differently and the more they see it, the more likely it will be taken on-board.  Therefore, any workplace safety communication messages need to include a variety of communication approaches such as posters, training videos, staff newsletter and ‘toolbox’ talks.  They all need to be branded with the company’s unique safety messages.

In addition, the workplace safety communication must be personalised to the company.  Generic safety messages won’t cut it.  Instead, it needs to be formulated according to your culture and demographics.  And then it needs to be followed up with action.

A lot of companies that we have worked with have successfully used a customised training video as the main communication medium to drive OHS behaviour change. They have then supported the training video with posters, newsletters and other safety specific materials.

A staff training video is an ideal way to connect with staff.  Made correctly it will positively and believably demonstrate your company commitment to the healthy and safety of your workplace.  After all, research has found that training videos are more persuasive than written material which is perceived as less important and credible.

In order to take into account the new laws, consider creating a customised training video that includes:

• An introduction by senior managers talking about the importance of safety to the staff and company.
• Safety rules/explaining that poor safety effects the viewer and other workers
• Procedures
• Summary

Of course, just playing a training video doesn’t automatically ensure that staff will know your training messages.  It needs to be followed up with a consistent workplace culture that always considers the safety rules/message in every activity.  Not just when played on a training video.

More importantly, senior management must support and agree with all the safety communication tools.  And refer to them often.

After all, staff won’t believe that the company backs its safety messages, until they see the proof of action.

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