As management guru Peter Drucker once put it, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Administering safety training quizzes is not only beneficial for learners, but the quiz scores themselves can also be a valuable source of insight for safety managers and anyone managing a crew they want to keep safe.
Measuring your crew’s understanding of your job safety program is key for managing safety onsite – after all, if they don’t know it, they won’t do it. And one powerful way of knowing what your crew knows (and remembers!) is to track their understanding through quizzes.
Quizzes offer far more than a simple “Y/N” data point for understanding. When well-conceived, quizzes can provide robust information about not only what information is being passed on through your safety training, but also:
- How effective specific safety training topics might be. If learners are scoring low on ladder safety, for example, but their scores for rooftop protocols are otherwise solid, it could be that the materials for that training topic are somehow lacking or the quiz itself is confusing or poorly designed. On the flip side, if everyone is scoring perfectly or near perfectly on a quiz, either the topic material or the quiz might not be rigorous enough.
- How trainees differ from one another in their understanding. Learners are diverse, and training that works for one member of your crew might not insufficient for others. Scores that vary widely across individuals can reflect inconsistencies in how crew members are being trained, for example, or might reflect a more senior employee’s seniority and familiarity with a topic in contrast with a more junior and less experienced employee. Another thing to watch for are scores that might reflect a demographic trend: Native English speakers’ scores might differ from those who speak English as a second language, for example.
- How much information is retained. Quizzing early and often can provide a useful glimpse of whether or not your crews are retaining what they’ve learned. It’s not often enough to learn something once: Repetition is key for putting safety at top-of-mind and keeping it there.
- How trade partners have received training. If you are providing toolbox training to your trade partners, quizzes can help monitor how effective the training is for each of them. Zurel’s Toolbox Talks make it easy to track training across crews – even those your company is not itself training. It’s up to the entire team, after all, to make sure everyone stays safe!
- How learners have been trained over time. Keeping records of quiz scores can help you watch for emerging trends in how information is (or isn’t) being retained by your crews, say, with the implementation of a new training protocol. Trend data can also show you if certain aspects of training are retained from one job to the next, or if the addition of different learning methods can help enhance the efficacy of your training program.
With regular quizzes and a good handle on the resulting data, you can design and administer job safety programs that meet the needs of your crew, meet regulations and provide a valuable look at where your training programs are in good working order, and where they could use a shoring-up.