Gamification in Safety Training

Gamification in Safety Training

Safety is a serious matter, yet safety training is often seen as a mandatory expenditure. Well done training is, however, a real chance to positively impact personnel work safety and well-being, but also business outcomes. The way training is done is not indifferent.

In the Jan-Feb 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review was an interesting article: Retailers Are Squandering Their Most Potent Weapons. One of the article’s key messages was that one of the most important competition benefits of traditional stores against global web providers is having skilful staff who’s able to help customers face-to-face in all their questions.

The same article had also researched the impacts of digital training on staff performance. The result was that each training course increased personnel sales +1,8% compared to personnel who hadn’t received training. Impacts measured by average sales per hour in percentages were vast, +46%. 

Perhaps corporate training has real and measurable business impacts, a.k.a can bring profit, and their value is not just keeping employees happy, while being an expenditure. 

One interesting training topic of industrial side businesses is health and safety. Many of us have undergone safety training. The topic is a serious one.

Accidents caused by inadequate safety are not just about money. In the worst case they can cost human lives. Unfortunately, many safety training courses are still organised in the form of mandatory slide-show presentations, undergone quickly before getting to real business. Training materials are often mere text or overall pictures or warning signs, i.e. “Attention! Forklift”

In addition, the actual safety training often starts very late – when you get to the actual factory.

Forerunner companies have taken steps towards more effective safety training. They have taken i.e. the following methods into practice:

• Digital versions of repeated safety training, which are possible to go through before arriving at the factory. This ensures both, personnel and outside stakeholders, like subcontractors and suppliers, can be served. Completing these courses can be decentralised from classrooms to be done in their own locations with mobile devices, allowing the company to still be able to measure that the training has been completed.
• 360° panorama images of real workplaces/factory lines. This enables a completely different visualisation when the important things regarding safety training can be combined to the user’s real environment.
• Make use of gamification and transform boring safety training into an engaging experience. This ensures making a lasting impression in the user’s memory. Most likely, not only for the millennial generation, doing safety training in the form of a mobile game is a hit.
• Combined branching paths to training. The point being that dramatic elements also work in safety training. Being able to demonstrate to the users in a safe environment what incorrect actions or decisions can cause is often a powerful message. When done in a digital form, it’s not only easier to measure success, but also possible to provide supervisors with valuable information on further training needs. 

The new era of corporate training has begun. What do your safety training methods look like? Start gamifying your safety training now and make sure your employees can benefit from interactive learning experiences, allowing learners to practice decision-making in simulated scenarios. Leveraging innovative training methods and thus better understanding of safety issues empowers individuals to protect themselves and others from safety hazards.

Seppo is a gamification platform where companies can easily gamify their corporate training. Besides an easy-to-use platform in multiple languages, we offer our SaaS license customers pre-configured training game templates which make creating gamified training easier than ever.

Read more about different solutions for gamification with Seppo on our Solutions Page.

Find out more about Seppo’s features on our Features Page.

References:

Fisher, M.; Gallino, S. & Netessine, S. January/February 2019. Retailers are squandering their most potent weapons. Harvard Business Review. URL: https://hbr.org/2019/01/retailers-are-squandering-their-most-potent-weapons. Accessed: 15 May 2023.