Customer Story
eLearning That (Literally) Saves Lives
With Bridge LMS, SafetyNow creates engaging safety and compliance training that reduces clients’ accident rates
Mission
Our mission at Bongarde is to make people safer, healthier, and more productive at work. We actually help our clients save lives and ensure that workers return home safely each and every night. We’re proud of the products we offer and the work we do.
The Challenge
Every year, more than 4.1 million workers suffer a serious job-related injury. It’s important to us that our clients and their employees don’t add to this number. Insurance is expensive, and keeping business up and operating is imperative, but more importantly, companies just want to keep their people safe. We know employees are your most precious resource and we need help training them about safety in the workplace. We want to ensure they both learn how to work safely and retain that knowledge long term.
The Objective
Every year, more than 4.1 million workers in the U.S. suffer a serious job-related injury or illness.1 And more than 12 workers die on the job every day.1 In addition to the stress and pain inflicted on employees from workplace accidents, these injuries and illnesses cost employers an exorbitant amount each year: roughly $1 billion per week for direct workers’ compensation costs alone.2
While corporate learning can seem aspirational, in the realm of safety training, learning is a tactical process with an explicit tie to hard costs like insurance premiums and also to intangible costs like human pain and suffering
SafetyNow, a division of Bongarde, works to reduce costs for employers and also to reduce overall pain and suffering for employees through preventative education and training.
In step with this mission, SafetyNow needed a way to ensure their training actually improved and saved the lives of learners, which would mean overcoming some short-circuiting in the human brain. Roughly 70 percent of learning is lost within 24 hours of a training experience, not to mention the material that isn’t retained at all in the first round of learning. How can you help learners remember life-saving information if they don’t absorb it all in the first place and forget most of what they remembered initially?
The Approach
SafetyNow empowers their clients to be smarter and safer on the job through impactful learning and methods that increase learning retention—saving lives in the process. This results in secondary benefits like reduced client costs through lower insurance premiums. SafetyNow has a multi-pronged strategy to provide these benefits for their clients, including:
Going beyond PowerPoint
By creating courses with updated, modern, engaging content, SafetyNow keeps learners interested. With social commenting features and video-based learning, they leverage the latest technology to ensure people are learning, not yawning, during their safety and compliance trainings.
Scaling by transforming classroom learning into e-learning
Although traditional, in-person training worked for SafetyNow, as demand grew for their expertise, they needed a way to serve more customers quickly. By moving to an online format, they could reach more people faster. An added bonus from the learner side was that busy professionals in manufacturing, mining, and similar industries could complete trainings wherever was convenient for them.
Leveraging a built-in retention mechanism
In SafetyNow’s world, just checking a course completion box isn’t enough. They’re passionate about ensuring that learners remember the life-saving knowledge they receive. To make this possible, SafetyNow leverages Bridge Retain, which sends learners repeated, low-stakes learning opportunities, complete with in-the-moment feedback, so they can retain the training they’ve received.
How SafetyNow Measures Success
By pushing out safety training in a holistic, modern way, SafetyNow has been able to genuinely affect the bottom line and operating health of their clients:
- One client saw a $1 million reduction in insurance premiums due to a 57 percent reduction in accidents and incidents after implementing SafetyNow’s courses through Bridge for just six months.
- Retention of core safety training increased five times after two weeks when compared with learners who did not receive courses with Bridge Retain. Additionally, the group of learners using the retention functionality had a marked improvement in engagement with the overall training program and completed subsequent courses in half the time.
- Another client saw a 7 percent reduction in insurance premiums and a 71 percent reduction in accidents and incidents.
Resource: Business Case for Safety and Health
Industry
Safety and Compliance Training
Established
Bongarde 1929
Headquarters
Stamford, CT & Kelowna, BC
