June is National Safety Month, and to celebrate, we’ve put together some ways you can enhance your industrial safety training. Safety is paramount in any industrial workplace, but traditional safety methods can be boring, unsystematic and not data-driven. If employees aren’t engaged in training, they won’t remember safety procedures, and that creates massive risk and costs in your operation. We’re giving you 3 better alternatives to traditional safety training.
Great industrial safety training engages the learner, creates muscle memory, is inherently safe, is repeatable and measurable, and, of course, reduces workplace accidents.
Too often, safety training is just the opposite: it’s boring, doesn’t include any hands-on practice, and doesn’t truly measure how much knowledge a learner has retained. The result? Workers become complacent, forget proper procedures and risk injuries. Annual safety training becomes a day for employees to zone out rather than refresh crucial skills.
With a little bit of creativity and technology, any industrial employer or technical training facility can turn dull safety training into interactive, memorable experiences that keep the whole team safer and more productive. Try these 3 methods to enhance your safety training.
It’s important that your employees understand the common causes of workplace accidents and receive training regulated by organizations like OSHA. But keep this in mind: most people working on the shop floor are hands-on by nature. They’d rather learn by interacting than listening alone. So while going through safety courses is necessary, you’re much better off doing so through multimedia, interactive eLearning than handing out packets and going through PowerPoint presentations.
Amatrol’s eLearning is a great example. As you can see, their safety training courses are full of engaging graphics, interactive pages, knowledge checks, pre- and post-quizzes, videos, activities and more. Learners will be constantly clicking, engaging with the pages and checking their knowledge retention.
Some of the safety training eLearning courses include:
What’s great about eLearning safety training? It’s engaging, interactive, measurable and data-driven!
You can learn more about Amatrol eLearning here.
Once you’ve built a baseline of safety practices and procedures with your workers, it’s time to put it all to work. Don’t skip this step! It’s not enough to teach the concepts; your workers must go through the process themselves, building the muscle memory needed to take the right steps when they’re in a live safety scenario.
Virtual reality is a great place to start because it mimics real scenarios (all the sights, sounds, motions), but in a safe, controlled environment. When training new employees in fall protection, confined spaces, fire suppression or lockout/tagout – wouldn’t you much rather start them in VR than throw them into a live scenario?
Intel did, with a 5-year ROI of 300%.
In 2017, Intel’s field team was experiencing more-than-usual electrical accidents – a total of $1 million in cost – so they decided to take a closer look to see what was causing this.
Turns out, 90% of the root causes were behavior-based, caused by employees not following proper procedures. They selected a group of their workers who had been at Intel for years and had taken and passed the Electrical Safety Recertification Course (WBT). But when asked to perform simple electrical operations in VR, 75% of this group struggled to select proper equipment and had no clear understanding of the proper sequence for task execution.
So Intel switched their electrical safety training to VR rather than presentations alone. As a result, they recorded a 5-year ROI of 300%, reduced the total cost of ownership, increased trainee retention and motivation. Best yet, the trainees enjoyed VR training so much that 94% wanted to do more VR training.
When’s the last time your employees said they enjoyed safety training so much that they wanted to do it again?
We suggest FreeRange XR for your virtual reality safety training needs. The platform uses a regular Oculus headset and controllers to immerse trainees in real industrial safety scenarios.
The modules have two parts: tutorials and scenarios. Tutorials actually teach the process, step by step. Learners will be taught which PPE to use, what steps to take, and practice those steps over and over again until they’re ready to test it out. The scenarios put the learner in a realistic situation where they have to choose their PPE and step through the process without the guidance of the tutorial. Afterwards, they’ll receive a score and feedback on what they did well and what they missed so both the learner and trainer can measure progress.
FreeRange XR has training modules for the following safety procedures:
What’s great about virtual reality safety training? It’s safe, repeatable, measurable, hands-on, and engaging!
You can learn more about FreeRange XR virtual reality training here.
Virtual reality is a great first step to building muscle memory, but nothing beats getting your hands on real industrial equipment.
Let’s take lock-out/tag-out as an example. You could train your employees on proper lock-out/tag-out procedures on live shop floor equipment. That would certainly give them the practice they need. But it also carries safety risks and requires equipment to be down for training.
We recommend lock-out/tag-out training systems that are specifically designed for this purpose.
The Lock-Out/Tag-Out Trainer by DAC Worldwide features a realistic, simulated working process environment that facilitates introductory training with hands-on activities related to the process of identifying and locking out sources of dangerous potential energy in an industrial setting.
The training system includes two process tanks; a centrifugal pump; a complex, multi-purpose piping network; electrical controls; and a variety of lockable system components. A lock-out/tag-out kit that features a large number of commonly-encountered locking and tagging devices is also included.
You can learn more about the DAC Worldwide Lock-out/Tag-out trainer here.
Bayport Technical has a similar training system, which you can check out here.
Interested in anything we’ve shown you here? Ready to make your safety training more interactive and data-driven? We’ll be happy to connect with you to find the best industrial training solutions for your team. Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch soon.
