There is little doubt that our attention spans have been found to be … hey, lookie there!

Sorry. Our attention spans have been getting shor … hey! Look at that bright shiny object!

See? The point is, we have to make our points more quickly and efficiently or people will tune us out.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Arscott via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Arscott via a Creative Commons license]

It can be easy to blame our short attention spans on the Internet and how quickly we can get information, photos, videos and other graphics to our eyeballs. If only it were that simple. However, it is fair to say that we have developed quite a need and expectation for stimulation and that because there are so many distractions now, we can very easily move from one idea to another as soon as one idea starts to be boring even for a second.

In that regard, this is why more traditional methods of teaching and learning are going by the wayside, even in an occupational health and safety culture. Health and safety lessons need to be taught regularly, both as new information for new hires and as review and updates for more experienced workers. But even workers are getting shorter and shorter attention .. look! That squirrel again!

Anyway, the challenge for safety officers now is to teach what is needed for workers to stay safe, and do it in a way that fills their attention span yet allows them to retain and use the information. This leads us into the area of what is called “micro learning.”

Micro learning is the concept of teaching a bite-sized concept in a short amount of time (usually a couple minutes). The more you keep the concept within a small block of time (instead of going on for 10 minutes), the more likely your students (or workers, in this case) will be able to retain and remember the concept, and thus the more effective your training will be.

You could still have the one-hour staff meetings that go over safety issues, but the meeting has to be re-structured so it’s not a single lecture or presentation. The broader point you want to make will have to be dissected into smaller pieces that can easily be described in 200 words or fewer. Establishing a building-block approach to your safety instruction should be an effective tool and make your meeting time more efficient and reduce the need for review or re-training sessions in the long run.

But if you have one of these traditional modules put toegether, how do you chop it up and present it in such a way that people will grasp concepts before the next squirrel comes into their sights?

Here are three quick tips to present micro learning to your workers:

  1. Portable. We are a very mobile society, and often our workers aren’t big fans of sitting still in a room for very long. So make your learning modules portable and mobile – where they can be accessed on a mobile device on the worker’s schedule.
  2. Bite size. Break down your module into small two- to three-minute pieces of information or concepts that workers can understand and process more efficiently. This is where you can use photos, graphics or videos to drive up important points.
  3. Engagement. Learning is more effective when it is active rather than passive, so get your workers engaged in your module by presenting it as a game or quiz so the worker participates in the module rather than just sitting there watching it. Engagement helps workers retain information better and more efficiently.

For more information about micro learning and how it can help with safety training for your workers, read this linked article.