Your 4-Step Guide to Improving Fall Protection with Microlearning
How you can implement a program that leverages bite-sized lessons to help workers fully digest a full course of fall protection education.
- By Shawn Smith
- Aug 01, 2023
This past May, OSHA released a national emphasis program on fall hazards. The goal: lower the number of workers hurt and fatally injured from falls. If you’ve been paying attention to fall protection incidents, this program’s development isn’t particularly surprising.
Falling has consistently ranked in the top 10 most frequent OSHA violations over the past several years. In 2021, roughly 10 percent of worker fatalities resulted from lower-level falls. Without being properly addressed, these falls, slips, and drops will continue to threaten the safety – and lives – of the people who work on your site.
Here, I detail how microlearning can help with fall protection and how you can implement a microlearning program that delivers results and keeps your team safe.
Background: What Is Microlearning?
Microlearning is a method of training that delivers small, bite-sized pieces of content that allow learners to study at their own convenience. The primary aim of microlearning is to combat “the forgetting curve,” which highlights the ways learned information can escape people’s minds over time. A popular statistic people associate with this phenomenon is that humans forget 80 percent of what they learn within 30 days if they don’t reinforce the lessons.
That lesson reinforcement comes in the form of microlearning, which helps for two key reasons:
- It’s configurable. Whereas formal training programs must comprehensively cover every aspect of fall protection, microlearning can bolster any part of the training program. That means you can use it to personalize training on your site. For example, one company might have several microlearning modules on how to use a safety net system. Another worksite might not have a safety net and instead offer microlearning content on portable guardrails.
- It’s easy to digest. A microlearning module shouldn’t be longer than five minutes. It’s there to boil down essential concepts of a training program. This means if an employee is on a lunch break and wants a refresher on how to use a mobile ladder system, your micro-content should explain that process before the employee finishes their sandwich.
Another key benefit of microlearning is that it can be easily accessed from anywhere, at any time, using mobile devices or other digital platforms. And because it doesn’t require extensive planning to make time for it, microlearning is an ideal approach for on-the-job learning and for those who may not have the time to review an hours-long training module during the workday.
Step 1: Audit Your Existing Formal Training Program
Because microlearning is a supplementary asset for a safety training program, it’s important to see what your formal training program actually entails before you identify microlearning opportunities. Some questions to consider as you go through this audit:
- What incidents have we experienced (if any) in the past three months? Six months? Year?
- How well do our employees score on training assessments?
- What are our longest training modules?
- How many topics does our training program currently cover?
- How often do we administer training?
- These questions are valuable because they help you examine your training approach – both what’s working well and what you can improve.
In the case of fall protection, you may review test scores and find that your team knows how to use fall arrest systems but isn’t using the correct PPE. Or you may work outdoors and find that more falling incidents happen during rainy seasons (wet surfaces are a key cause of fall violations).
Either one of these situations may signal the demand for a greater focus on training. That’s where microlearning comes into play.
Step 2: Reinforce Crucial Safety Lessons with Microlearning Courses
An important reminder: microlearning isn’t a replacement for your formal safety training. In fact, when it comes to compliance-based training – like fall protection – sessions often need to be a certain length, whether for OSHA standards or for employees to thoroughly understand the concepts.
For example, let’s say you have a lesson on how to properly use fall arrest systems. That session might span one hour, covering topics like how to adjust a harness, test the braking mechanism, and safely fasten any connectors. With longer, technical subjects like proper fall arrest system use, it doesn’t make sense to solely deliver the training in a series of five-minute lessons. Why? Because it’s unintuitive for first-time learners – or those who haven’t reviewed the compliance standards in years.
However, once employees have familiarized themselves with a certain concept, microlearning becomes an incredibly powerful tool for long-term retention. Put differently, it helps employees remember pieces of a puzzle they’ve previously assembled.
Maybe one of your workers knows how to use a fall arrest system but not how to properly inspect the system beforehand. When provided with a library of micro-content, the employee can find and watch any lessons that detail the inspection process. This way, your team member gets what they need in minutes – without having to pore over an hour-long video on fall protection.
Step 3: Measure the Impact of Your New Microlearning Resources
To maximize the positive impact that microlearning has for your worksite, you’ll need to already have a training program in place. Ideally, you’ll also have tools that capture operational data (like injury rates and near misses) and learning data (exam scores, module completion rates, etc.).
The reason: you want clear metrics that you can refer back to when reviewing your workplace safety post-microlearning deployment. Maybe your injury rates went down after six months of using microlearning. Maybe your no-incident streaks went longer. Maybe you had fewer close calls.
Of course, measuring the impact of your microlearning also extends to learning outcomes like test scores. This measurement has been made even easier with the popularity and effectiveness of gamification. In fact, 88 percent of workers feel gamification made them more productive.
Gamified learning (scores, leaderboards, badges, etc.) can help you more accurately assess employees’ understanding of certain concepts. For example, you may notice that some employees are having trouble with setting up safety monitoring systems. In response, you ask your entire team to complete the microlearning module on that topic in the next week. Once the week is up, you review the completion rates and test scores from that module.
If everyone completed and passed the module, that may be the end of the matter. But if team members didn’t pass, it’s an opportunity for you to reinforce the lesson with, perhaps, a live demonstration. The point here is that regardless of the next step you take, your microlearning helped inform it.
Step 4: Use Data and Employee Feedback to Hone Your Bite-Sized Content
As with any safety training, you want to adopt an iterative process with your microlearning. Nothing’s set in stone. There’s always an opportunity to deepen the value of your lessons.
When it comes time to evaluate your microlearning, lean on your employees. They’re the ones engaging with the lessons. Does your team have ideas for more micro-content? Do they want to change how one of your modules presents the information (perhaps from an illustration to a walkthrough video)? Collect these insights. If one piece of bite-sized content gets rave reviews, it’s worth assessing what that module does well and how you can apply it to other lessons.
Once you’ve gotten feedback from your team, see how it squares with the data. What are the test scores for certain modules? Have incident rates gone down in a certain area since adding a piece of microlearning content to address it? Broadly, how have incident rates changed since you implemented microlearning?
There’s a good chance you’ll see employee sentiments and data align. But in moments where it seems like feedback and data contradict each other, reach back out to your team. Try to uncover where that “gap” is coming from. Remember, data is important, but it doesn’t tell the full story.
The Easier to Comprehend, the Better Your Fall Protection Training
At the end of the day, the best training is the most comprehensible training. Your microlearning content doesn’t need to have every bell and whistle to work. Focus on what makes the content easy to access (mobile-friendliness), easy to reference (nothing longer than five minutes), and easy to reinforce (clear, concise instructions).
Trust me when I say this: if your microlearning keeps employees engaged, it’s also helping keep them safe.
This article originally appeared in the August 1, 2023 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.