Safety experts: Give employees their training a 'chunk' at a time

Brice Wallace 

Although they were making their points at an hour-long breakout session at a large event, a pair of executives recently evangelized that employee training is best served in quick, simple, bite-sized pieces.

Presenting at the Utah Manufacturers Association’s Manufacturing Safety Awards Expo & Conference, Jason Cuskelly, vice president of business development at Springville-based employee engagement and training company Tyfoom, and Kenyan Allan, vice president of broadcast at Springville-based ladder manufacturer Little Giant Ladder Systems, suggested that companies wanting to improve safety should consider “chunking” their training and incorporate technology to get that information across to employees.

Cuskelly cited statistics indicating that workers typically forget 70 percent of information within one day of it being presented and 90 percent after the first week.

“That’s a lot of loss in retention,” he said at the event, held at the Zions Bank Technology Center in Midvale. “That’s a lot of information they’re not going to be able to apply in the moment when they need it.”

A failure in many industries, especially construction, is that new employees or those coming from other companies often get a little orientation or training before being put in the field “where they can get seriously injured or killed,” Cuskelly said.

Instead, he said “microlearning” using YouTube videos can result in better employee engagement and information retention and ultimately a safer workplace.

“Typically, we’re making people drink from a firehose, right? ‘Here ya go, here’s four hours of information, all at once. Go to work. Here’s a whole day. Here’s a three-day course.’ … If that’s all they get and then they go to work and they don’t get anything else for a long time, you’ve just wasted a lot of time and money on all of that training,” Cuskelly said.

Engaged teams are 23 percent more financially profitable, have 59 percent better employee retention, 64 percent fewer safety incidents and 41 percent fewer quality issues then those that are not engaged, he said.

And, he added, we live in a video world. Nearly 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube and 1 billion are viewed on TikTok every day, with the average viewer spending 100 minutes a day watching digital videos.

Microlearning videos of one to 10 minutes in length can help companies that have the goal of getting all of their employees home safely every day, he said.

“Just think about the ways you can drive engagement with your employees,” Cuskelly said. “Maybe break up some of that kind of stuff that you’re doing. You’ve got to do the ‘big dump’ so you can get them out there, but give them a little bit of that … on a consistent basis and try to get them engaged.”

Allan’s company, Little Giant Ladder Systems, started using videos during the COVID pandemic. It built three studios and can now undertake live, customized, conversational, interactive ladder safety demonstrations for anyone, anywhere, in a language they can understand. One such day provided training for people in Ohio, Florida and Costa Rica, without having to fly anyone anywhere.

The same way that cars are different now from what they were 20 years ago — with backup cameras and lane sensors — information presentation likewise is different. “So, why would our safety training continue to be what we did 20 years ago or even five years ago?” Allan asked. “People [now] absorb information a little bit differently. … If you’re teaching ladder safety through placards in 2024, I don’t know that they’re going to retain that kind of information. Our brains are a little bit different than they were 10, 12 or even just three years ago.”

Cuskelly said companies can make their own video content to present to workers and can even branch out beyond safety to feature activities about other company departments, tasks and equipment. The information can be accessed anywhere at any time and be watched repeatedly if necessary or desired, all at a fraction of the cost of bringing people together in one location for a lengthy event.

Allan said that in the U.S. on an average day, 2,000 ladder accidents occur that require emergency room treatment. Of that total, 100 are serious enough to permanently disable a person, and one will lead to a fatality. Using technology to improve safety training can “bring that one person home, that fatality that will happen today,” he told the audience. “We want to help you in our common effort to bring that one person home that otherwise wouldn’t.”