How a Quarry Safety Manager greatly improved Safety Awareness among Contractors

Background

Conundrum Holdings’ quarry sites are involved in the extraction and processing of source rock to produce a variety of crushed rock products.  They are also involved in the manufacture and delivery of pre-mixed concrete and have sites in metropolitan and regional Victoria.

Conundrum has a high number of contractors entering their sites each week (over 300 per year).  Individual inductions were taking a lot of time by management and reduced their time on other business tasks.  The inductions also relied heavily on the communication and training skills of each manager.  As a result, individual inductions may have been inconsistent and there was no permanent record of what was actually delivered in each induction.

Here’s how we solved the problem:

Conundrum needed training materials that would be able to withstand extreme scrutiny and that could be used to train a variety of staff and contractors..

1. Using our Digicast Training Methodology, we converted the training materials into a friendly, conversational script in easy to understand English.  This was then approved by the safety committee.
2. During filming, care was taken to ensure that every single learning message was shot from a variety of angles to make comprehension clear (and to make the training video more interesting).
3. While with the edit, we paid extra attention to making sure that the all of the training messages were clear and could be understood by a school student.  Titles were added to increase message comprehension and retention.
4. All of the training sections were edited into stand alone chapters, allowing different contractors to be shown training video components that are relevant to their activities on site, rather than going through all of the induction video.
5. Each person now watches the video and is assessed on the content.  This ensures that Conundrum knows that contractors have understood all the information.

And here’s what happened:

• Management has greatly reduced their need for one-on-one training and now has time to complete other business tasks.  Length of time to train has decreased by 68% (from 42 to 13 minutes).  This is saving Conundrum $20,000 a year by reducing site manager's time to train by 2.5 hours per week.
  
• Contractors are more involved with the training, with video being an engaging media irrespective of literacy levels.  Now, workers learn the information much quicker and understand it all better than before.
• It has increased the perception both internally and externally that Conundrum cares about safety and their workers.
• Conundrum Holdings has been thrilled with the quality of the production and that they now have engaging training materials of a high standard.