One of the interesting – and equally difficult – things about delivering health and safety training, is understanding exactly who our customer is. Or rather, customers, as we are never really working just to please one person.

The reason it is difficult is because we frequently find ourselves catering for the needs of two distinct audiences.

Usually, an external training provider like International Workplace will find itself liaising with someone in a client’s human resources or learning and development function. They will be responsible for:

• Identifying training needs,
• Sourcing suppliers, identifying and enrolling learners, and
• Tracking learner progress.

This can often be the case where health and safety training is concerned, too. But not always. Frequently, health and safety training falls under the remit of a client’s compliance or risk management function, which in some cases operates outside of their organisation’s learning and development system altogether. That distinction makes a big difference to how organisations approach health and safety compliance overall.

This can add a layer of complexity to the business development and procurement process, with the need to understand the requirements of multiple stakeholders. Yet despite any challenges, International Workplace is a ‘people business’; we always welcome the opportunity to engage with our prospects and clients to properly understand their needs – especially when it comes to health and safety compliance software.

The dichotomy between these two audiences also tends to be reflected in the software applications and platforms they use.

It would be unusual for those working in learning and development not to already have a learning management system (LMS) or learning experience platform (LXP) that they use. If this is you, you may:

• Rely on it to manage and administer talent development and/ or training programmes within your organisation.
• Be committed to it, having potentially been involved in selecting and procuring it in the first place.
• Feel you and your fellow employees are confident with it.

Or it might be a function of an ERP system, like SAP SuccessFactors, that has been mandated throughout your organisation. Either way, there’ll be an existing way of doing things that works for you, and there would need to be a good reason to move away from that.

For those businesses where it is the health and safety function that mandates and manages training in this discipline, while you are likely to employ health and safety compliance software to manage operational risk, it’s generally not designed to track and manage health and safety training.

It’s not that both operational risk and health safety training can’t exist in a single platform, it’s the fact the respective data processed by these applications aren’t usually well integrated. That is a huge, missed opportunity that International Workplace is working to address with the development of our Workplace DNA® platform.

To understand why this is a missed opportunity for health and safety compliance, it’s important to look at what a typical client learning platform does, and the sort of data it generates.

Learning technologies have become more sophisticated, moving from what were essentially content delivery/learning administration systems to talent development platforms that promote and provide insight into learner engagement.

Where health and safety training is concerned, however, we find all too often that the primary data that is important to our clients relates to learner activity records. The key metrics we’re asked for and judged upon time and time again relate to the time-honoured measures that have been around since the SCORM framework was last updated over 20 years ago, yet they tell us very little about whether learning has actually improved health and safety compliance in the workplace. For example, we are often asked how to measure learner progress:

• Have they started their course yet?
• How far have they progressed?
• Have they completed it?
• Did they pass or fail?
• What score did they get?

All very basic statuses related to a learner’s engagement with a monolithic content block (or more simply put, a ‘course’) which – if the employee in question is unfortunate enough to find themselves mandated with – will have to be completed again and again each year, in the name of ‘refresher’ training.

What if organisations could employ learning engagement metrics to improve worker wellbeing, or reduce the frequency or impact of health and safety incidents? Workplace DNA® makes this possible, producing actionable insights that go far beyond certificates and attendance records. What if you could get data from your health and safety compliance software that would help you to:

• Utilise learning engagement metrics as a leading indicator of safety risk.
• Identify teams, roles or locations with low engagement, and introduce learning interventions to address weaknesses before incidents occurred.
• Benchmark the effectiveness of your health and safety training program against peers in your sector.

The resulting evidence of performance is often still issued in the form of a certificate, which employers process for the purposes of health and safety compliance. While certificates remain important for audits, there’s an opportunity to do more with the data to improve compliance outcomes.

We had an enterprise client who until recently required us to provide hard copy (paper) certificates for employees who’d successfully completed IOSH-certified training courses, so they could photocopy them and keep them in a binder at a regional office, which they deemed essential for audit purposes. When we said we were planning on producing IOSH certificates in digital copy only, they said they would rather find an alternative certification body if we couldn’t provide hard copy certificates.

Things have moved on in the two years since that exchange, but it’s important to recognise the strength of feeling around the need for evidence of compliance in health and safety training records. And what actually constitutes ‘evidence’.

It’s equally important to recognise the need for compliance data to be integrated with – and accessible through – systems and platforms that people are familiar with already. Not everyone is an ‘early adopter’ who welcomes new ways of doing things. People who are familiar with how everything works in their employer’s LMS don’t necessarily want to have to learn how to use yet another new platform. Making them switch can act as a drag on productivity causing people enter into what Daniel Kahnman refers to as “slow brain” thinking in his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’.

Could the data from a centralised health and safety learning platform see the death of the certificate? Personally, I would love to think so. I was a lone voice at our recent International Workplace company conference, arguing certificates were an outdated concept:

• They’re easily fakable
• They only measure attainment at a specific point in time
• All-too often they recognise learner attendance over learner engagement
• They fail to capture the performance improvements that accrue to the learner and their employer from the learning intervention.

In reality, however, a centralised platform like Workplace DNA® presents an opportunity to digitally enhance what a certificate is and does, regarding knowledge of the discipline of health, safety and wellbeing. This can only be achieved because of the integration of the subject matter with the measurement of learner engagement, which takes place over time. That means constructing content in a much more granular way, mapped against hundreds of learning outcomes that are themselves aligned with globally recognised credentials in the field.

This creates stronger evidence of health and safety compliance and provides a richer picture of workforce learning.

What’s more, real-time learning data can be integrated with the health and safety compliance software organisations already use for risk management. This creates a more connected ecosystem, enabling businesses to close the gap between training activity and operational outcomes.

What this then allows employers to measure is much more detailed, relevant information about:

• Learner engagement with health and safety content
• Real-time data that can be integrated with the health and safety compliance software for operational risk management,
• Insight into health and safety compliance and performance.

The ultimate aim for International Workplace is to satisfy the needs of both types of audience: HR and learning and development professionals, and those in the health and safety function tasked with training and development. Without better data integration, organisations risk missing out on insights that could strengthen their health and safety compliance strategies. With modern platforms like Workplace DNA®, and through the integration of health and safety compliance software, businesses can finally link learning with operational outcomes. This ensures not only evidence of compliance for audits, but also tangible improvements in workplace safety performance.

David Sharp is CEO of learning provider International Workplace. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management,, and a Technical Member of IOSH. He holds a Masters in AI Ethics and Society from the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.