All businesses have a responsibility to provide a physically and psychologically safe workplace for their employees. Doing so is incredibly beneficial for businesses, as employees who feel safe and trust their employers are more productive, satisfied and engaged.

Many small or new businesses rely on face-to-face sessions, or a piecemeal collection of pdfs, powerpoints and word docs for their safety training. There are many drawbacks to these approaches, from lost time and productivity, to poor knowledge retention and low satisfaction from employees.

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As a result, many businesses are looking to move away from these training methods and towards online learning solutions that can provide training that is more consistent, engaging and automated. This has been a major trend in the past year, and looks set to increase even further in 2022.

The online training industry has responded to this need by developing all-in-one training platforms that allow people to create, share and track digital training courses with little-to-no training required, no matter their budget.

So, if you’ve been thinking about how to introduce online training courses, but aren’t sure how to use online courses in a training program, check out these tips. 

Flipped classroom model

The flipped classroom model originated from education research and literature and aimed to totally rethink how classroom training takes place. Typically, teachers introduce new concepts during class time. The problems and activities that require students to apply the new concept are left to homework, when the teacher is no longer around to answer questions or clear up confusion.

The flipped classroom model encourages teachers to, well, flip this arrangement by swapping where the understanding and applying elements happen in the teaching process. First, teachers provide resources that allow students to teach themselves the new concepts at home. Then, class time is spent on applying the new knowledge in learning activities while the teacher is available to support them.

Businesses can easily take advantage of this model to maximise the effectiveness of their eLearning training courses through a blended learning approach. Blended learning is simply any approach that combines both digital and face-to-face learning components. Blended learning is an extremely popular approach as it capitalises on the advantages of both methods.

With a flipped approach to safety and compliance training, employees can learn key concepts from online courses before any face-to-face sessions. This allows trainers to then maximise their face-to-face time by focusing on answering questions and physical demonstrations.

Meet important compliance requirements

If you’re thinking about safety training, chances are your business has important compliance mandates to meet.

Meeting these legal requirements is incredibly important for ensuring the safety of your employees. However, ensuring all your employees are up to date can be challenging, especially for teams without dedicated compliance officers.

eLearning can be the ideal way to make this process smoother and easier. By converting your safety and compliance training to digital courses, you can cut the amount of time your employees spend in training by two thirds. Not to mention, you can avoid needing to dedicate a trainer to presenting the same sessions multiple times every year, allowing you to boost productivity and lower costs.

Online courses can also include assessments of your learner’s understanding, and can easily track your learner’s progress and completion. This not only improves accuracy and efficiency, but also makes it far easier to demonstrate your company’s compliance for reports.

Overall, converting your business’s face-to-face training to online courses is one of the best ways to efficiently and effectively meet your safety and compliance requirements.

Equip your team

Businesses who are serious about creating safe workspaces for their teams need to look beyond mandated training to training that equips their team with life skills that promote healthy working, from skills like resilience and emotional intelligence, to positive daily habits.

By upskilling your team members in these ‘soft’ or ‘power’ skills, you give your team the ability to actively promote the physical and psychological safety of the workplace.

Psychological safety can often be overlooked in safety training programs, but it is just as critical for safe and healthy workspaces.

In fact, teaching these skills to your team can be such a powerful strategy that HowToo has developed a range of dedicated templates and ready-to-go courses to make it incredibly easy to implement. With ready-to-go courses on topics such as Wellbeing in the Workplace, Remote Working and Equity and Diversity available for free on a HowToo Growth plan, you can simply add your business’s logo and then share these courses with your team in minutes. 

Conclusion

Digital training, safety and compliance are one big match made in heaven. 

Online training courses allow you to slash the time spent in training sessions, and spend any face-to-face time on teaching things that can only be taught in-person. This far more efficient process will boost the productivity and satisfaction of your whole team, while meeting your compliance requirements easily and accurately.

If you’re interested in exploring how an all-in-one training platform can support you through every step of the process, why not start a free HowToo Starter plan now, or book a demo with a member of our team?

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