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.

Think you need help to improve your company induction training materials?  Then, go to the seminar to find out more information.

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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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Truck driver training

Recently, I was speaking to a client about what baseline figures we needed to measure before and after his company induction training video gets released.

What I found interesting was that even though there are some key figures we can measure (eg: trends in customer complaints and accidents), as far as he was concerned the video was mainly a holistic training device to help in a number of key areas that were immeasurable.

In this company, they have 450 truck drivers who do a vitally important job.  Yet, other staff members in different departments and even the truck drivers themselves, do not realise how important this role is to the company success.

The training video has been written to let truck drivers realise how important their responsibilities are and the broader impact on the company itself.  This is part of the all-important introduction which clearly lets drivers know what the company does, who they serve, how their job role impacts the company, the importance of safety and their job responsibilities.

The induction video is a way of connecting emotionally to these truck drivers so they realise the importance of their ambassador role for the organisation while also ensuring the fresh and timely delivery of their milk products.  It also includes procedural tasks.

Interestingly, my client made the remark that the training video was really a different communication medium to ‘put life’  into their induction document.  And while it is important to train on procedures, it was more important to align the truck drivers with the broader perspective of their job and the company vision and values.

What pleases me, is that this organisation understands that training is not just about teaching the right processes, it is also about getting staff aligned with what the company does and why, as well as the importance of jobs.  It’s not just about delivering a product on time, it’s also about the being an important visible representative of the company.  After all, a truck driver that is discourteous reflects badly on the company reputation.  By letting staff know the greater meaning and importance of the job, the more they will see purpose in what they do which will result in better performance, but also better job satisfaction.

After all, a happy team is a productive team.

What can you do to your training materials to provide information about the importance of the job role and its relevance to the broader perspective to your company?

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LearnX Asia Pacific 2010 recognizes Digicast Productions as producing induction training videos that are like gold.

We are very excited to be given a gold award for the induction training video we created for our wonderful client Conundrum Holdings.

The reasons we won were because of the amazing time/cost benefits we have saved Conundrum, as well as providing higher quality training.

Since the induction video was introduced at Conundrum Holdings, Conundrum’s induction training has been re-invigorated and they now get praise for their induction system whereas before they mostly got grumbles.

“We continuously aim to improve the safety and productivity at our quarry sites.  Now
that we have a quality training tool that can be incorporated into our site induction
process, it has reduced the time to train staff/contractors by 68%. A major benefit has
been the saving to management time which is saving us around 2.5 hours a week or about
$20,000 a year. Site managers now have more time to get on with the task of actually
managing the sites. But more importantly, it still ensures that the inductions are of a
consistently high standard and we no longer get complaints from contractors about
having to sit through another dull site induction”.

Tom Kerr, OHS Manager/Quality Assurance Manager, Conundrum Holdings

Thanks to LearnX and Conundrum for this Award.

You can read more about how we helped Conundrum, here.

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According to a recent article published on IndustrySearch, companies lose 10% of their annual turnover, as a result of poor safety costing billions in lost production and flow-on effects.

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Back in the early 90′s, there used to be an Australian comedy series called “Fast Forward”, that featured a character called, Calvin Cunnington (played by Michael Veitch), who would burst into laughter at any sexual innuendos mentioned in the workplace, subsequently driving his colleagues mad.

As a training video producer, specializing in safety and induction videos, as well as marketing videos in the industrial arena, I come across training materials that are pretty dry.  My job is to transform the training materials into training video scripts that are interesting and will improve message retention and comprehension.

Yet weirdly, I feel a bit like Calvin when I read training materials and find all sorts of sexual terms lurking behind quite mundane and technical text.

My favourite one is slab penetration.  Any shape and size of penetration can be made through decking.   If size of penetration is greater than one rib…..

I couldn’t work out what it all meant and was very surprised to discover that slab penetration is all about cutting.  Who knew that cutting a piece of metal is really all about penetrating and that even the size is so important?

The next one is “insert the fuel nozzle into the receptacle“.  Okay, that’s probably harmless and the more I think about it, it would be pretty hard not to write that in a suggestive tone!

But time and time again, I come across very technical training materials that seem to use a lot of references to penetration, erections, vibrator compaction (ouch!) and receptacles.  And many times, I’ve felt that the words are just said too many times or could be substituted for something else.

It reminds me of my biology notes at school.  I found it quite funny to write orgasm, instead of organism in my personal biology notes.  My mother read them and was quite disturbed that I had got those words so wrong.  But that was just a teenager deliberately exchanging words for a bit of fun.

What I can’t work out is whether men are deliberately slipping in sexual terms because they are finding the material just a tad boring and they want to spice things up a bit.  Or whether it’s all a bit subconscious.

One thing for sure is that while inserting sexual terms into training might be a bit of fun for the writer, it certainly doesn’t help the learner.  Once I stumble on sexual innuendos in a very non-sexy topic, it is fairly distracting.  Particularly, when I can’t understand how in the world cutting can be replaced by penetration.  Or maybe it’s just me (or just a girl thing)?  Maybe men are fine with all of these phallic phrases and don’t even notice them.

But as for staff training, how do employees go with reading these training materials?   Are there Calvin-esque type sniggers occurring during induction training in workplaces across the country?

What I want to know is has anyone else experienced sexual terms being inserted into training materials (or even marketing materials) that just seemed a little bit inappropriate?

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In a recent AFRBoss article, it was cited that an important trend over the next decade will be the shift from words to images in communication.

Rather than bombard people with an avalanche of reading material, people will prefer visual representation of data.

This isn’t a surprise given our time-poor, attention-scarce, give-it-to-me-now lifestyle.

So to future-proof and update training materials, now more than ever, there is growing importance for companies to use visuals to aid in learning.

After all, we remember:

• 10% of what we read
• 20% of what we hear
• 30% of what we see
• 50% of what we both hear and see

In fact, studies by educational researchers found that 83% of human learning occurs visually.   Visually rich training materials keep the eyes busy and therefore, the brain more alert and active to learn information.

Yet, I often get amazed when I go through company training manuals how so few of them include pictures or even colour for that matter.  And of course, very few of them use video as part of training.

“Something is happening. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through words, but by reading images.”

Paul Martin Lester, “Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication”

What can you do to start making your training materials more visually appealing?

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1. Ensure that there are common goals between management and staff. One way to accomplish this is by defining desired outcomes for the unit/business and measuring the unit’s or business’ success towards accomplishing those outcomes on a regular basis.
2. Explain why. Many supervisors just tell their staff what to do. However, informing them why tasks are done a particular way, or why certain behaviors are required goes a long way towards eliminating worker/supervisor friction, ensuring that the tasks and behaviors are actually done correctly, and that improvements in the workplace occur through suggestions from workers who are performing those tasks on a regular basis.
3. Be results oriented. Many workplaces value time over results. However, unless a job function is time-based (e.g. customer service phone representative), reward the results of someone’s work more than their face time on the job. A worker who works a normal work day but produces high quality output and new ideas is more valuable than the worker who spends more hours at work but produces lower quality work and has fewer new ideas.
4. Promote balance. Many workplaces want their employee’s top priority to be their job; over family, over enjoying life, and maybe even over life itself. In my opinion this leads to employee burn-out and many employees eventually working on “auto-pilot”. The best employees are employees who have a balanced life. Whether they balance work with family, playing softball, donating their time to a not for profit, or going to the movies is irrelevant. When an employee has balance and works for a business that promotes balance, when that business needs him/her to go through a period of time where work comes first, they will do it and be effective.
5. Demand the best. Don’t accept workers being just okay. Remind them that they weren’t hired to do a so-so job. They were hired and are being paid to do a good job.
6. Hold workers accountable. Your workers are adults so treat them as adults. Don’t act like an enabling parent. Don’t accept excuses, don’t allow them to slide through, don’t allow them to point fingers. You’d be surprised how holding workers accountable results in good workers performing at their best and feeling fulfilled at work; and bad workers (probably performing a lot worse than you realize) quitting or starting to look for work elsewhere.
7. Reward properly. This means both rewarding the right people and rewarding them appropriately (no big reward for a small accomplish). This includes verbal praise as well as tangible rewards such as raises and bonuses. Nothing disrupts the smooth operation and effectiveness of a workplace more than the best workers not getting the recognition/rewards they deserve. Therefore you need to be aware not only of the actual performance of your staff, but their perceptions of who are the best workers. Then you need to take steps to ensure that their perceptions coincide with your employees’ actual performance by communicating what you value.
8. Encourage creativity. Not everyone is creative. Therefore, creativity needs to be part of “going above and beyond” not part of the expected work product unless a person’s job is a creative position (e.g. writing advertising copy). That means that creative employees may not be creative on the job since it isn’t part of their standard job functions. So encourage creativity by always responding positively to creative suggestions (unless they are clearly ridiculous) and reward useful creativity with excellent rewards.
9. Provide ongoing feedback. Don’t leave your employees waiting for their annual review to know how well they are performing on the job. Also, don’t wait for them to ask how they are doing. Provide ongoing feedback; positive feedback to your top employees (but also include areas where they can improve) and constructive feedback for others (don’t just let them know they need to improve, but give them steps to take to help them improve their performances). Also let your employees know that they really need to worry when they are receiving no feedback from you. For the under-performing employee, lack of feedback on their performance means you do not think that employee can improve, so you aren’t wasting your time talking to him/her about his/her job performance. This is also a good way to send a message to employees you would like to look for work elsewhere.
10. Build an effective team. All managers obviously promote teamwork. However, there are some who build teams of workers who all have skills and knowledge that overlap their own, but at a lower level. Other managers build teams with workers with skills and knowledge that compliment their skills and knowledge. You would be surprised how many take the first approach since they either are intimidated by employees that know more than them in a specific area, or they do not have confidence that they can make good management decisions on topics that they are not knowledgeable on. However, that is not the way to build an effective team. Build your team with employees that have skills and knowledge that you do not possess, and have confidence in your ability to think logically and make solid management decisions.

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When we were all young children, we all used to bug our parents with lots of  “Why?” questions.  And while this can test even the calmest of parents, the truth is children are curious about the world around them and want to understand why things happen.  It helps them learn and communicate.

Yet, somehow, as we get older, we forget the importance of why questions.

Recently, I went to a talk by Michael McQueen from NexGen Group.  He believes that one of the top five mistakes that leaders make  is that they pass on the ‘how’, but not the ‘why’?

And the reason why this is a big mistake for most companies is that often company processes are perpetuated without people ever questioning why we do something.  Over time, staff are taught processes that solve problems that no longer exist.

He then read us The Pot Roast story:

There was a young woman who moved out into her own house. While living at home, she never cooked. Upon the move, she returned home to learn how to cook a few dishes. One of her favorite recipes was Pot Roast. So she asks her mother to show her how to cook one.

The mother begins to share her expertise with the daughter. She tells her to salt and pepper the meat well. To make sure the vegetables are all cut the same size. Just before the mom places the roast in the pan, she picks up a knife and cuts about a ¼ of an inch of roast from each end. Then she places the meat in the pan.

The daughter stops her mom. “Mom, I understand why we cut the vegetables the same size – that way they’ll cook uniformly. And I know the reason we salt and pepper the meat all over – and rather heavily, is so the whole roast will absorb the flavor of the seasonings. But why did you cut a little bit off each end of the roast before you placed it in the pan?”

“Because that’s what you do”, said the mom.

“But why?”, questioned the girl.

“Does it help it cook better?”

“Well, I do it this way, because that’s the way my Mom taught me”, said the mother. “But I’m not really sure why we cut the ends off. Next time we go to visit we’ll ask her.”

Several months later the family gathers at Grandma’s house for dinner. As grandma prepares the meal the mother and daughter are in the kitchen with her. The daughter asks her grandmother, “Grandma, you’re such a good cook, and I know you passed all your methods on to Mom, but I can’t figure out why we cut the ends off of the pot roast before we cook it.” The grandmother turned to her granddaughter and said, “What are you talking about? I don’t cut the ends off before I cook it.” At this point the mother jumps into the conversation and says, “Yes you do! The time you showed me how to make pot roast, you started to put it in the pan, and then you put the roast back on the cutting board and cut about a 1/4 inch off each end of the roast. I’ve been doing it that way ever since”, she declared!

The grandmother stared at her daughter in amazement. “Every time you cook a pot roast you cut a ¼ inch off the ends? Every single time?” “Yes!” She answered her mother. “Every – single – time, just like you showed me.” “Honey, all I can say is you’ve been wasting a lot of good meat over the years. The only time I ever cut the ends off the roast is if it’s too big for the pan!”

In my role, I am given the opportunity to review new employee induction and procedural training manuals.

When I work on the training materials to write the training video script, I constantly add the “why” to procedures.  And the interesting thing, is that when I ask a company why a process needs to be done in a particular way, they either realise that we either need to get rid of the process or that we can explain the process better.

Where in your company can you ask more ”why’  questions to improve your processes?

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For many companies, both large and small, new contractor or employee orientation is a perfunctory process.  It usually involves a manager who might prefer to be working on other jobs talking through a PowerPoint presentation or checklist. This is usually followed by introductions and a tour of the premises. Then, the new hire is thrown into the workplace with little consideration for the confusion that comes with commencing a new job or the site-specific hazards that may exist.

Improving the Induction Process

Successful companies understand that that a well-oriented employee will approach a new job with heightened confidence resulting in better performance and productivity. They are also more likely to be committed to the company reducing high employee turnover costs.

According to Randolph Cirilo & Brian H Kleiner from Management Research News 2003, they found that effective orientation programs provided more substantive content, face to face learning, utilized vivid presentation techniques, participative learning methods and involved management.

While XpertHR UK in April 2009, found that highly successful inductions were structured and formal.

So what is a Better Induction System?

The good news is that the best induction process will not only cost you less to train staff, but will actually improve your training outcomes.

And yet the answer is one that is often overlooked by companies – an induction training video.

A custom made training video for your workplace:

• Teaches the same amount of information taught by instructors in half or a third of the time.
• Increases comprehension and retention of the subject matter by approximately 50% over printed material alone.
• Commands the attention of the viewer and motivates them to learn more.
• Is more persuasive than written material which is perceived as less important and credible.
• Provides faster rollout and take up of training.
• Ensures consistent training messages are communicated.
• Relieves the trainer of repetitive tasks.

How does it work?

A well-planned induction video provides structured training that can even include introductions from senior management, freeing up their time.

While using visuals to communicate is also another major advantage as it makes difficult processes easier to understand.

Tom Kerr, the OHS Manager from Conundrum Holdings explains how a customized induction training video has simplified the induction process of contractors and staff across their work sites.

“We were finding that delivering individual inductions for all contractors and staff working on our sites was taking up a lot of management time. We also didn’t have any real evidence that each induction was consistent or that everything was getting covered, “explains Tom Kerr.

“Now that each person signs off they have watched the video and are tested directly on their knowledge learnt from the video, we can be sure that they have been made aware of all safety hazards and controls. The training is now more engaging and has the advantage of putting visual cues to the site rules and procedures. Given the inherent dangers with working in a quarry it is important that we train our staff and contractors to work safely. It also imparts our company culture really well. Another benefit is that we can refer staff back to specific areas of the video for more employee specific refresher training”.

For companies looking to improve their induction process, a custom made training video for their workplace can provide successful learning outcomes, reduce incidents and injuries, while decreasing training costs.

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