eLearning - The Right Way To Teach Safety & Injury Prevention?

We do unsafe things even though we know they are unsafe. I’m pretty sure that we don’t always know why, but sometimes because there are social and professional rewards for being unsafe, or costs for being safe (taking breaks means you don't get promoted, saying you're uncomfortable means you are a whiner). Sometimes it’s because we’re lazy, and sometimes it’s because we're trapped in the middle of conflicting information (deadlines are important, but so is taking your time).

 

What does this have to do with eLearning? Well... eLearning - and “education” generally - is designed to impart knowledge and then test for the successful delivery of that knowledge to a learner. The assumption for safety is that people who know how to work safely will work safely. Questionable, eh?

 

While it’s entirely true that a person is more likely to behave in safe ways if they know what is safe, what isn’t, and the potential consequences of acting unsafely, it is not deterministic of safe behaviors. Knowing how to be safe is a necessary but insufficient precondition for actually acting safely. In this way, teaching safe behaviors is very unlike teaching something like math – someone who knows that two + two = four is very unlikely to tell you that it equals five. Experience (ahem…) tells me that knowing – for example – that driving above the speed limit is unsafe does not result in people driving safely. 

 

If people do unsafe things even though they know those activities are unsafe, then lack of knowledge isn't the root cause of all injury. Therefore, any intervention can and will fall short if trying to solve this problem by relying exclusively on education and knowledge in the hands of the could-be-injured person. 

 

Injury	Cause	Cure
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome	Lack of knowledge of causes and symptoms	eLearning
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome	Overworked	Different incentive structures for employee behavior
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome	Manager is relentless in focus on productivity	Increase manager accountability for injury rates in conjunction with productivity

 

Put simply, eLearning is a great solution if the root cause of your problem is fundamentally a lack of knowledge. Sophisticated systems for understanding root causes might say something like, "eLearning is a great solution when injuries are occurring because of a cognitive root cause." 

 

Next post, we’ll dig into some things our customers are doing to prevent injuries that blend with eLearning and other solutions, based on their understanding of root causes within their organizations.