Occupational health and safety in multimedia

The value of multimedia in all its forms in education and training is widely accepted by the educators, multimedia specialists and the domestic "got a very powerful PC give me all the software you got" maniacs. The group who are more often harder to convince are the GMs, the directors and the middle manager operatives. What will get them interested is demonstrated cost savings and policy compliance and reduced down time respectively. During this presentation I will discuss two cases where multimedia training has provided the means of meeting these objectives. One in the Chemical industry and the other in the Building and Construction industry.

The occupational health and safety management system

• The Board defined the Company Occupational Health and Safety Policies as broad statements of philosophy.
• In order to define what must be achieved, 19 standards were developed to cover all areas of Occupational Health and Safety.
• To provide guidance on how to achieve these requirements, a comprehensive set of model procedures was developed.
• The model procedures are modified if required to meet local requirements.
• The proof of the system is in the application of local practice. Otherwise the system is not more than a paper process.
• A system is not a system unless it is audited and a quality based system of specialist and management review audits put in place.
• The final step in the process involves a "letter of assurance" which provides the Company Board with a written summary by each business of where it is in relation to compliance with each standard.
• Two continuous improvement steps are also included in the process to ensure that Occupational Health and Safety performance through this system does not become static.

The organisation has about 11,000 employees on about 80 locations. The main means of training in the previous management system has been a five day conventional lecturing and workshop style management course. Course participants gave glowing assessments of the course, but a re-evaluation in 1991 showed that after five years, only about 500 employees in the Company had received this training.

The decision

• we required certain knowledge competencies of all employees
• we needed the capacity to assess assimilated knowledge
• required learning process needed to be interactive
• there were large numbers of employees to be trained
• there were widely dispersed locations which had to be reached
• in a number of situations, it is difficult to take large numbers of employees away from the workplace at once.

The product

• the management system itself
• the basic information about SH&E for new starters.

The CBT module clearly states the objectives of the training and the skills which will be achieved after the training. It then describes the management structure for SH&E and the strategy to be followed. As the information develops, questions are used to check for understanding and retention of key concepts.

Graphics are used to provide a picture of the overall scheme for each part of the strategy, such as auditing, then details and questions to fill out the details follow.

The CBT is used to lead the employee through the Company Occupational Health and Safety policy, and in particular, what the individual responsibilities are to meet that Policy. What follows is an explanation of the mandatory standards and the non-mandatory procedures.

The influences of legislation and individual responsibilities under the law are also covered as well as the role of agencies such as Worksafe in Australia. The opportunity is also taken to highlight the Company Emergency Response Service. The Module concludes with a summary followed by a series of questions to check understanding of the whole module.

The outcome

Case study 1: The chemical industry

The need

• legislation
• the Chemical Industry's commitment to openness, ie. Responsible Care
• the organisations internal requirements
• the organisations new policies.

The solution they developed applied quality management principles to Occupational Health and Safety and integrated all of the above requirements into a single management system.

Case study 2: The building and construction industry

The environment

The organisation need

In this capacity he authorised the conduct of an organisation wide skills audit using the as yet unendorsed national competency standards as a base. It became apparent that there was a skills gap in the area of occupational health and safety. We came in at the point where our client was grappling with:

• the need to address this deficiency,
• formulating enterprise bargains that addresses the inclusion of training at a level that is acceptable to the unions and provides the organisation with productivity gains
• providing evidence of legislative compliance in occupational health and safety
• being seen to be at the forefront of industry reform, and
• wishing to respond at an industry level to training reforms dictated by the Australian Vocational Certificate (AVC).

The training need

• be delivered on site,
• cater for learners for whom English was a second language,
• comply with the national competency standards,
• be easily accessed,
• be assessable,
• be run by people with limited training background, and
• allow for testing of practical competencies.

The solution

It was then necessary to convince others of the suitability of the medium. The most appropriate way of doing that was to produce a demonstration. You can see this demonstration after this presentation.

Producing the demonstration

We also took some time to talk to the workers on site and attended a site induction course. We also took a tour of a site under construction guided by the occupational heath and safety expert who was able to point out the hazards and the mandatory day to day precautions taken on a construction site. In this way we were able to gather real data to be used in the scripting and production.

The design
The second stage of the production phase is to bring the design team together. This team consists of creative script writer, graphic artist, video producer, psychologist and programmer. Together we decide on the overall tone, the means of hooking the learner, the flow and the assessment points. This is of course done using the parameters and directives as outlined earlier.

The instructional design
The training is then designed resulting in a story board, voice over script and video script. Subject matter and language experts are asked to review and approve the content and the script.

The production
At this point the script and story board are handed over to the production manager who coordinates the video production, sound/voice recording, graphics, animation and programming.

The validation
To ensure the final product meets the demands of the stakeholders it undergoes a final inspection and approval from the interacted parties.

The pilot
Our production will then be piloted with the learners over a period of time to gauge its success in application, both in terms of site and user acceptability, and achievement of educational objectives.

The demonstration
The demonstration was designed to create interest in the construction worker. This was done using video to bring home the concept leaving home safe and going home safe. We filmed real workers in a real environment.

We gained involvement of the learner by simulating the work place on the screen and asking for interaction with familiar work place scenes. The learner has the incentive of being assessed as competent in a recognised national competency.

We invite the learner to participate without threat or difficulty by using a touch screen to make choices or move the lesson along. All interaction is acknowledged and responded to.

The keys to gaining acceptance
To gain acceptance for multimedia is no different to selling training solutions in any other medium. You must demonstrate productivity gains and a positive bottom line effect.

Author: Virginia Taylor Price Waterhouse Urwick, Management Consultants Price Waterhouse Centre, 215 Spring St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Tel: 03 666 6111 Please cite as: Taylor, V. (1994). Occupational health and safety in multimedia. In C. McBeath and R. Atkinson (Eds), Proceedings of the Second International Interactive Multimedia Symposium, 540-542. Perth, Western Australia, 23-28 January. Promaco Conventions. http://www.aset.org.au/confs/iims/1994/qz/taylor.html