Employee training is a fundamental cornerstone to the growth of any organization, and environment, health, and safety (EHS) training helps to reduce injury and illness while promoting personnel safety. For this reason, managers in charge of health and safety must ensure that every employee meets the organization’s EHS goals.
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To meet such goals, EHS managers must go beyond simply ticking off a training checklist and retiring to work and add tracking employee training progress in their training calendar.
This way, the safety and health of employees are guaranteed. Some important metrics to track include course completion rates, course progress, assessment scores, employee behavior to learning experiences, and the employees who need training.
Why Track Employee Training Progress?
1. Find areas of improvement.
How would you know whether employees will support a culture of safety in the organization after training?
How would you know whether employees prefer video training and interactive methods instead of e-learning or coaching and mentoring when delivering content on occupational health and safety?
Certainly, you would know if you track employee training progress. Afterward, use the information to update your training activities and improve employee training performance and goals.
2. Gather data, metrics, and stats.
E-learning courses or training provides you with data and stats such as employee scores, training effectiveness, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to pick out identical patterns in employee behavior.
You can use this data to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of an employee training program or improve employee training performance.
3. Ensure compliance with the company regulations and operations.
Every profession today requires that employees have training and certification in occupational health and safety. To be compliant, offer training, and track training progress to ensure employees complete the training process and that they don’t hold expired or fake certificates.
4. Reduce employee turnover.
Proper employee training is one of the key pillars of reducing employee turnover.
If the training and tracking process aims to improve workplace safety and employee investments, it will enhance employee commitment to the company, improve morale, and reduce turnover intent.
7 Ways to Effectively Track Employee Training Progress
As you can see, launching an employee training program and leaving it at that may not help you meet your safety training goals.
It would help if you also kept every employee on his or her toes to ensure your training resources don’t go to waste! Here’s how to track employee training progress.
1. Leverage tracking tools.
Employee tracking tools help make the work of tracking training easier.
Tools like learning management systems (LMSs) have many features for administration, documentation, management, and even reporting. E-learning platforms, too, have similar capabilities. Besides, the data is kept in one place for easy use and manipulation.
You can use these features, data, and information to track course performance and engagements and determine whether your training is effective.
However, when monitoring employee progress using software tools, ensure employees understand your intentions to quell their fears of being spied on.
2. Create a process for tracking.
To gather more insights into your training, you need a process for tracking progress. This includes details you will analyze, such as training completion dates, facilitator evaluation, and time logged in or out in training modules or employee reactions.
You also need to identify the dates for the tracking process, who will assist you in this activity, the resources you may need, and how to write your report or evidence. Once you have laid out the foundation of your process, it will be easier to generate reports and recommendations to develop better training methods and review insights to reduce training frictions and improve training results.
3. Give out assessments.
There are several types of assessments or performance reviews you can use to gauge or track progress. For example, pre-assessments help you know whether employees are getting instructions, find their strengths and weaknesses in dealing with accidents and what is missing in the course, and add employee input.
Once you have completed all the checklists or requirements, you can measure the results to identify areas of improvement.
4. Pay attention to course reviews from employees.
Before or after completion of a course or module, ask employees to provide reviews or comments about the training. Here, ask open-ended questions to avoid receiving canned responses. You may also request employees rate the course or trainer.
The data collected may give you a bigger picture of employees’ progress in training. If employees give low reviews or show a poor attitude toward the course, it may be a sign the training program is not helpful. You can find out why and address or fill the missing gaps.
5. Observe employees on the job.
It is assumed that once employees have gone through training, there will be some improvement in workplace safety and health. Alternatively, they should be able to apply what they have learned. For example, if employees didn’t know how to handle injuries at the workplace, they should now be able to respond appropriately without outside help.
If employees go back to their old ways of doing work after being trained on new occupational safety methods, it is a sign there is no progress in training. Additionally, if employees show low morale toward complying with health protection and environmental management protocols (e.g., they don’t wear a mask at the workplace), it could be another red flag that the training is sloppy.
6. Use supervisor reports and feedback.
Supervisor reports and feedback may also be used to track employee training progress.
Supervisors are constantly with employees managing on-site safety training programs and can easily note if employees follow safety laws or work to reach the safety goals they learned in training.
Their recommendation and feedback can be used to gauge the success of a safety training program and employees’ skills. Supervisor reports are also very useful for tracking on-site safety training methods, safety seminars, and workshops.
7. Use informal feedback from managers and fellow employees.
For a health protection and safety training program, we expect 100% attendance and completion rates. But if your employees are only doing 40%, you need to find out why. That feedback can only come from line managers and fellow employees.
The report from managers can tell those in charge of occupational health and safety whether employees are demotivated or find the course difficult or irrelevant.
Over to You
Launching an employee training program is the first step to minimizing workplace injuries and ensuring compliance with regulations, but this shouldn’t be the end of the process.
You need to fast-track how every employee is making progress with the training, which could include giving out assessments, on-the-job monitoring, studying reviews from employees, and using feedback from line managers and supervisors. If you don’t track your employees’ progress in training, you risk putting their health and safety in jeopardy.
 Adela Belin is an independent content strategist and marketer with a love for the written word. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn. |