Your safety culture management system defines your values, behaviors and expectations. It is an integrated organizational learning culture that sets the context of everything your company will do today and in the future. At its core, your system should be able to record, report and reward employees based on their engagement in a menu of leading indicators.

Web-based services make this possible. Employees can access your safety culture management system via personal accounts that allow them to track their involvement and progress toward tangible rewards and recognition.

An e-learning system has the ability to record user activity, thus providing management with details of how often individuals have accessed the course, what results have been achieved, and how long each has spent within the course. Modules can be OSHA 10-hour, MSHA certification refreshers or even custom-content related to specific facility operations and procedures.

The leader as learner
We invite you to do a little self-assessment. How much do you value learning? What have you learned in the past year? What new concepts and principles are you using today that you weren’t using last year? How many nonfiction books have you read (not skimmed) in the past year? How often do you ask yourself, “What will I learn today?”

As a leader, you set an example for everyone in the organization. If you open yourself to learning, you will motivate others to do the same.

Lessons e-learned
Learning is a deeply personal act that is most meaningful when the learning experiences are relevant, reliable and engaging and when they suit an individual’s learning style. While technology in and of itself may not guarantee better learning, when effectively deployed, it can help focus attention while attracting and maintaining a learner’s interest.

Your Learning Management System (LMS) should be robust enough to handle multimedia content and feedback loops that engage those who learn in both traditional and nontraditional ways. This technology allows the learner to have relationships with information using visual, auditory and kinesthetic methods and can challenge the learner to relate new information to that which is already known. The more engaging the experience and the more intentional the results, the greater the likelihood that learning will occur.

An e-learning platform also offers employees the opportunity to accumulate points for successful completion of modules within the courseware. These points can be earned in the same way points are earned for completing a safety audit or submitting a near-miss report, resulting in an automated incentive process built into the e-learning system.

The LMS records results of the learner’s experience, including the time spent in each category of knowledge. This information can be vitally important in the event of a health and safety incident to prove that compliance training was undertaken and monitored. Moreover, a full suite of reports can be immediately available to gauge real-time progress toward sustainable improvement in safety, health and productivity.

Take the e-challenge
A competent consultant can offer rich, engaging content as well as the tools necessary to deliver an exciting e-learning platform that can be fully integrated into a safety culture management system. Who knows? You just might be able to corral those cats after all.