Last year, workers completed a record-breaking 1.7 million online safety courses with HSI.

The average course rating across all of our safety training titles: 3.8 out of 5 Stars.

How many stars would your employees give your current program? Hold that thought…

Employees today have certain expectations for the training experience:

• They expect training to match the culture of the company
• They seek autonomy in the workplace
• They want freedom to reshape processes in new ways
• Training should encourage growth & professional development

At a time when many skilled labor organizations are in a war to attract and retain talent, the modernization of workforce training has developed critical mass.

Here are three reasons why employees love online safety training:

It’s More Fun Than What You’re Doing

“Never underestimate the importance of having fun.” – Randy Pausch

Here’s the simple secret to a big problem: to get your employees engaged with any safety training exercise, you must provide them with an engaging experience.

One of the top training challenges identified in the study Safety Training 2016: Educating & Protecting Your Workforce, was “employee indifference”

In that study of safety professionals, 61.2% of participants said “employee indifference” to training was “somewhat of a problem,” while an additional 13.8% of safety pros said it was “a significant problem.”

In other words, 75% of surveyed safety professionals say employees just don’t care enough about safety training.

Before you explore that statement for truth, or decide if employees are simply bored by the material, I’ve got two questions for you:

1. Have you given them a reason to care?
2. What are you going to do about it?

Think about the teaching strategies employed by the best educators from your past—how did they make a science or algebra class fun?

We know that training shouldn’t be boring; when it’s boring, it fails.

Today’s workforce is the premier consumer of subscription media content because they have disposable income to spend online with some of our current customers, like Netflix and Pixar.

Employees expect to be entertained and want to enjoy their work—that’s always been true and has never changed.

What has changed is the availability of new training technology that matches the entertainment options consumed by the workforce.

Nobody goes home and clicks through PowerPoint slides or pops-in a DVD anymore.

So there’s an expectation that the educational material itself should be structured to hold attention, either through creative multimedia, or in new approaches to stale material.

Gathering your workforce to sit in a conference room to watch something is the fastest way to put this group to sleep; most will disengage, learning little at the expense of the company.

Online safety training solves the “engagement” problem in several ways:

• Training online requires attention
• Most employees spend plenty of time online consuming content, so it is familiar, comfortable
• Use of new digital media—film, animation, audio, text—aligns the training experience with entertainment
• Employees control the experience, moving at their own speed, by stopping, starting, and “going back” just like they do with media at home.
• Individual workers must engage with the training to complete each safety course and move forward
• Employees are the sole active participant; training isn’t something they have to sit through, or passively watch—it ends when they finish it.
• It’s 1 to 1, with each individual held accountable for competency through testing—no other employee can pass or fail the exam.

It’s Fresh, New, Different

‘‘When you do what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford

The biggest reason to do something different—even if you think things are going well—is to demonstrate your organization’s commitment to safety in a real way that will impact the welfare of your workforce.

It is all about safety climate, how employees feel about your level of commitment to safety, and attitudes about occupational safety.

When you may find yourself in a position to actively influence your safety culture, you find opportunities to make a positive difference, in ways large and small.

Here are employee engagement factors that safety professionals can directly influence:

• Relationships
• Budgets
• Policy Implementation
• Safety Performance Criteria for Teams & Individuals
• Training
• Safety Protocol
• Auditing, etc.

The importance of mixing things up cannot be understated.

Shaking up the safety training regimen is a great way to reignite interest in safety and seize the opportunity to increase awareness across the organization, creating buzz.

It also gives you a chance to be responsive to employee-driven change or incorporate workers into key safety decision making; when you assume responsibility for safety performance, you share ownership of goals with your workforce.

For most organizations, it is not a question of if safety training materials and delivery will change, but when, and how far behind the curve are you…

Find your organization on the Training Technology Timeline and determine if it’s time to modernize your safety training by moving online and stepping into the cloud.

It’s Fast

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency." – Bill Gates

Online safety training courses average 20 minutes to completion.

Since the speed of course completion is up the employee, most of our customers find that courses are completed even faster than the average.

Employees love that because it means they can get back to doing the job they are paid to do, quickly.

Do you know how fast it takes to train a group of employees on Aerial & Scissor Lift Safety with live instruction? About one hour.

And employees have no control over when the experience begins or ends—they are a captive, passive audience.

Do you know how much it costs for live instruction? Here’s an example:

• 75 employees + $25 hourly wage + 1 hours of training time = $1875
• 75 employees + $25 hourly wage + 2 hours of training time = $3979
• 75 employees + $25 hourly wage + 3 hours of training time = $5968
• 75 employees + $25 hourly wage + 4 hours of training time = $7957
• 75 employees + $25 hourly wage + 5 hours of training time = $9946

By delivering safety training online, you can cut the cost for compliance topics by over half, training those same 75 employees on 15+ different topics for $4500.

That’s the biggest reason why employers love online training—it’s equals 3x productivity.

Why safety professionals love it, is because they are able to do more live, hands-on training, because covering compliance is much easier and much faster.

More training, less time.

Bonus Quote

“The heart and soul of any company is creativity and innovation.” – Bob Iger

Nobody gets excited for compliance training because it’s compulsory, yet occupational safety is deeply personal.

Wherever training happens today, the best experiences involve technology.

You can develop the most the incredible safety training content to share, but if you deliver it in a lecture or live training format, or PowerPoint, you’re going to lose the audience, quickly.

Because that type of training experience is ‘more of the same’.

Predictable, boring, routine, expected.

It’s also a break with how they spend their time outside of work—online, in front of screens and mobile devices.

Some think that if the employee audience doesn’t pay attention and fails to absorb the safety training material they are personally accountable for, it’s their problem.

That’s wrong.

And that’s why employers need to match the employee expectation and deliver a modern experience—they are in the driver’s seat.

If employees aren’t educated on important safety content related to their job, it’s a problem for employers.

By getting closer to technology, you can deliver a more impactful training experience that is efficient, avoiding those issues by connecting with the audience at a higher level.

Training which incorporates tablets, smart-phones, and relevant, ‘real life’ scenarios through interactive simulations, brings the audience closer to the material and makes training easier to understand.

‘Old school’ training techniques just don’t connect with this generation of the labor force.