Online instruction and e-learning for employees and contractors
Over the last few years, we have helped many clients introduce and, most importantly, establish online instruction in combination with e-learning in their companies. After all, the long-term success of new software depends very much on its acceptance by employees.
Reason 1: Ensure legal requirements and traceability of instructions
One of the biggest benefits of online instruction is being able to inform your own employees, as well as those from outside companies or even visitors, about their safety training responsibilities. This means that those to be instructed are themselves responsible for carrying out their safety training.
Of course, supervisors or safety officers remain responsible, but the use of software also makes individuals responsible.
Another advantage is the complete traceability and documentation. All responsible persons are informed about the training and instruction of the employees as well as the current completion status. If safety training is not completed or tasks are not passed, the instruction officers can act accordingly and, for example, seek discussion with their team members.
All this leads to better completion rates of instructions, which are documented and reported with the software in a standard-compliant and traceable manner.
Reason 2: Standardize your instructions and trainings
Many companies struggle to provide the same consistent training to all employees.
Possible reasons for this may be:
- They train different employees at different times.
- You train your own employees, but also external companies
- You use several different trainers.
- Employees work in different shifts, at different locations, remotely or at home in a home office.
Online instruction makes it easy for you to deliver the same content to everyone who needs training. Moreover, it does not matter from where the employees complete the instruction and training, nor when, i.e. at what time of day, they do it. All learners receive the same information and content.
More standardization is not possible!
Online learning even helps you deliver consistent training or instruction to a multilingual workforce.
All courses can be rolled out in any number of languages, and managers have complete control at all times. Ideal also for your HR (Human Resources) to keep an overview worldwide.
Reason 3: Use more options for conducting briefings
Are you familiar with the following situations: you have different employees working different shifts, at different locations, on the road or working from home offices?
With online instruction and training, you can deliver safety training on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets in addition to desktop computers. Even the application directly in production is realized more and more often by our customers. The courses then take place on special touch counters designed for manufacturing, known as kiosk systems. Participants log in manually or via RFID (radio-frequency identification) and are shown the appropriate training courses and instructions, or even instructions for machines, directly and personalized.
Another great advantage of online instruction is that individual lessons can be revisited at any time. Courses that have already been completed or started can be accessed directly at the workstation currently in use at any time.
Likewise, it is possible to design training and education so that it is specifically tailored to machines. Imagine a team member drops out and the replacement has never done the job before! With a sensibly designed system, this person can train themselves within a few minutes and complete the necessary instruction for the machine or device.
Reason 4: Reduce safety training costs
When you implement online instruction software, you’ll find that it helps you dramatically reduce the cost of safety training And that’s while maintaining or even increasing the effectiveness of the training. One of our customers told us that the instruction solution we developed paid for itself in just one day!
Of course, one of the biggest factors why online instruction and training reduces the cost of your safety training is that you no longer have to deliver your safety training in on-site, face-to-face events.
Especially if you have production at many locations or in several shifts, it is very time-consuming to really instruct all the necessary employees on a topic. Vacations, illnesses and other absences also often mean that a training session has to be held x times, with all the organizational effort that this entails.
Eliminating instructor-led training results in significant savings in costs associated with travel, lodging, renting training sites, paying outside training consultants, paying overtime, lost work time, purchasing meals, snacks and refreshments, and so on.
In addition, you also minimize the effort required for training administration: informing employees about upcoming training sessions, creating training records, storing them in a legally compliant manner, documenting and evaluating them – all this can be done more efficiently and economically with the help of an intuitive, automated system.
Reason 5: Use ready-made training and instructions
Do you already know the SCORM format?
SCORM is an international standard that allows learning content to be easily imported into software-based training and instruction systems.
This gives you the opportunity to purchase ready-made instructions and training courses from specialist publishers. This saves you from having to build up the learning content internally and, in most cases, from having to update it. Many providers even offer fully certified learning content. This, of course, keeps your company on the safe side legally.
Of course, there are also plenty of ready-made training and development courses in SCORM format to buy on the market. For example, provide your staff with software training for office products such as MS Word, MS Excel or the CRM system.
In addition to the many advantages, SCORM also has a disadvantage. The packages you buy are usually not changeable and therefore very standardized. This may result in a decrease in acceptance, especially in the area of occupational safety. It is important to weigh up the benefits for the company and the acceptance of your workforce.
A good e-learning software (also called learning management system, LMS) therefore has an intuitive authoring tool with which the corresponding individual learning content can be easily created without much effort. Or you can use the services of a professional e-learning agency to develop high-quality, customized learning content and thus ensure the long-term learning success of your employees.
Conclusion
Certain safety instructions and their documentation are explicitly required and are prescribed by law, thus an obligation for entrepreneurs. In the digital age and also in crisis situations (keyword Corona), online instructions are not only fit for purpose, but also future-proof and make a valuable contribution to corporate success – good reasons to introduce them.
The acceptance of the workforce is the most important factor – because prevention, personal responsibility, appreciation and legal certainty serve the entire company. Rely on our successful concept for further training measures and digital instruction.
For your questions, we are happy to help and advise you free of charge!
Still curious? Then contact us, we will be happy to answer your questions!