Smart companies use gamification in safety training
Safety is a serious matter, but safety training is often seen as a mandatory expenditure. Well done training are, 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 Jan-Feb 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review there 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 benefit of traditional stores against global web providers is having skillful staff who is able to help customers face-to-face in all their questions.
The same article had 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 and while being an expenditure.
One of the interesting training area of industrial side businesses is health and safety. Many of us have undergone through safety training. The topic is a serious one.
Accidents caused by inadequate safety are not just about money. In the worst case they cause human lifes. Unfortunately many of the safety training are still organised as 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 starts often 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 to practice:
- Created digital versions of repeated safety training which are possible to go through before arriving to the factory. This ensures both own personnel and outside stakeholders like subcontractors and suppliers can be served. Completing these courses can be decentralized from classrooms to be done in own locations with mobile devices, allowing the company to still be able to measure that the training has been completed.
- Used 360° panorama images of real work places / factory lines. This enables a completely different visualization when the important things regarding safety training can be combined to the user's real environment.
- Taken use of gamification and transform boring safety training into an engaging experience. This ensures making a lasting impression in the user's memory. I claim that i.e. for millennial generation creating safety training in the form of a mobile game is a hit.
- Combined branching paths to training. With this I mean that even dramatic means work in safety training. Being able to demonstrate the users in a safe environment what incorrect actions or decisions can cause is often a powerful message. While being able to measure success, it's also possible to give supervisors valuable information on further training needs.
The new era of corporate training has begun. How do your safety training methods look like?
Seppo is a mobile platform where companies can easily gamify their corporate trainings. Besides easy to use platform we offer our SaaS licence customers pre-configured training game templates which make creating gamified trainings easier than ever.Read more about our safety game template here.