And if you do take undertake  training and development programs, how can you best prepare your people – before the program – to be open and receptive to what they’ll be learning and then support them after the program to make sure the learning sticks and you receive a return on your training investment?

Safety Dimensions and Leadership Dimensions offer clients our Online Learner Portal with capabilities in the areas of culture surveys, program pre-work and online refresher programs with the ability to measure an organisations safety and leadership culture maturity, prepare learners prior to the commencement of a program, and embed and reinforce the learning after a program has finished.

We do this on our cross-platform, web-based and secure learner focused online portal, designed and customised for the needs of each client.

Elements of the Online Learning Portal

Culture Surveys & Analysis

Effective organisations constantly seek to assess, measure and analyse their current level of ˜Safety Culture’ or ˜Leadership Culture’. It’s those organisations who take the pulse of what their people believe (and how this impacts their behaviours), who can work towards interventions that make a difference – and what can be measured can be managed.

Our Online Culture Surveys can be designed to focus specifically on safety or leadership values, behaviours and attitudes of staff at all levels within the business as well as systems and process effectiveness.

After the survey is completed, the data provided to your organisation allows your organisation to utilise the information to gain a detailed assessment of the maturity of you organisation’s safety and leadership culture; and identify and prioritise areas for improvement, including future learning and development.

Our survey process provides a cost effective solution that quickly allows you to gain a realistic understanding of your current overall safety and leadership culture; and collecting employee and leadership perceptions enables evidence based shifts in your decision making based on data.

Survey results can be obtained through the analysis of a select sample population or via entire organisation participation. Furthermore, results can provide data to identify common trends, patterns, beliefs and issues most likely to present risk to the business at macro and micro levels, down to business units, projects, departments, locations etc. We also provide an extra option of analysing the data on behalf of your organisation and providing a report with recommendations that will support your organisation to progress to a œproactive maturity level.

The Online Culture Survey provides timely and speedy accurate data. In a safety context, this capacity to assess and verify safety culture also forms a crucial component of the Due Diligence verification and audit framework.

Importantly, such a survey provides the leadership and management team with a credible early warning as to latent failures in the WHS Management Systems, thereby helping to avoid serious incidents. In addition, your organisation can choose weather to receive all, or just selected responses anonymously which often may yield more candid responses when asking for feedback.

The Survey findings provide your organisation with the opportunity to drive significant strategic actions and will enable your organisation to better target you existing safety systems and/or leadership approaches, processes, tools and training.

Our experience in the design and development of Culture Surveys allows us to ensure the user experiences ease of use (which ensures a higher completion rate), whilst providing them with the opportunity to reflect on how things could be better. This has the added benefit of the œHawthorne effect – i.e. simply by announcing you are going to measure something – improvements occur.

Preparing your people – Online program pre-work

Participants often need to be guided towards the context of what they will learn from programs. Before attending they begin to search for the ˜Why’, the relevance and usefulness of them attending a learning intervention.

Utilising our Online Learner Portal for a Pre-Work activity assists them to more quickly open up to new concepts, ideas, skills and knowledge, which in these busy times means that the scarce resource of time is used most effectively by the participant and the facilitator.

Pre-Work also gives the facilitator a chance to review and adapt content and activities based around the specific group of people attending each workshop so participants can feel that the learning experience has been specifically tailored for them, something that once again increases the œbuy in.

As we know, buy in increases the likelihood to commit to integrating and practicing what they’ve learnt back in to the workplace on a day-by-day basis.

For Pre-Work one of our most often selected options are the use of short but relevant recent workplace performance case scenarios and the use of our proprietary educational video content. By asking additional questions in the portal relating to these scenarios and videos we can ascertain the learners understanding of expectations and culture within your organisation.

Making the learning stick – Online refresher program (post program)

Our online refresher programs act as a reminder of the key learning messages and skills provided through the original program they attended, as well as a consolidation of the improvements learners have made since the training journey commenced, and importantly, the challenges that may be still present.

The design and facilitation of our online refresher program focuses on re-emphasising learnings from our programs, explores and diagnoses how things have progressed since the training and looks at how the participants have been applying what they have learnt into their daily role.

The online refresher program is most effective when it explores how learners implemented what they learned previously. The learner revisits key learnings, with the option of re-watching key concept videos) and has an opportunity to provide details of any challenges and successes they have experienced in their area.

The post-program refresher also reiterates:
¢ Why this training was undertaken, contextualised in line with what is currently happening in your organisation.
¢ A reminder of the vision for your organisational culture around the way of working.
¢ That participants have a role as leaders in creating the desired future culture – now.

How does it work?
Key to the success of the online survey is in the development of the content and questions through consultation with our Subject Matter Experts and Instructional Design team. Our process and expertise ensures the data collected is gained through content and questions relevant to the organisation and directly relevant to the information your organisation wants to collect. All content and questions are customised specifically for your organisation.

Our Online Learner Portal is designed to be accessed via our website. We have kept the user top of mind to ensure usability and cross-platform compatibility, so all your people can have access regardless of what platform or device they use. The portal is secure and every client has a user password, which ensures confidentiality is maintained at all times.