Despite continued efforts by companies, nearly one-third of the global workforce remain unengaged at work. For context, that means more than one billion workers today are not doing their best and, consequently, leaving billions of dollars of value on the table for themselves and their employers.

Experts largely agree that engagement comes from looking past traditional satisfaction metrics like pay and benefits and instead focusing on the substance of the work being done, challenging employees, and tying the work to both personal and professional purpose. However, if companies are not well-equipped to provide the support required for employees to meaningfully succeed in engaging work, the cycle of workplace drudgery continues.

Companies may have become proficient in surveying their workforces, but many fall short when it comes to empowering employees to be part of the positive change so often requested in company survey results. Moreover, the jobs of the future – the ones that will generate the greatest engagement in employees – will demand that everyone improves his or her soft skills. Skills like empathy and design thinking are in short supply today, and workers expect that their employers will help them grow.

Teaching these skills is hard. Success requires that companies build upon three foundational pillars:

• Develop a culture that genuinely supports continuous learning and feedback.
• Train employees to provide that feedback constructively.
• Hold leaders accountable to practice and promote a learning culture.

From early stage to enterprise, an employee’s journey should be a company’s focus, so that employees are provided with the tools they need to learn from everyone and everything while driving career growth. Through promoting cultures of learning and frequent feedback loops, organizations can see positive long-term changes. In fact, when continuous learning becomes the status quo, it can literally help save lives, as it did for one company that implemented a new way of approaching learning and saw its workplace safety metrics change at an unprecedented rate.

Over 90 percent of companies in North America follow a traditional instructor-led training methodology for safety training. However, when one safety and compliance training group surveyed more than 2,000 safety managers, directors and operations executives, more than 95 percent reported that this traditional method was either losing effectiveness or wasn’t effective at all.

Each year, more than 4.1 million workers suffer a serious job-related injury or illness. Further, more than 12 workers die on the job every day. In addition to the stress and pain inflicted on employees by workplace accidents, workplace injuries and illnesses cost employers an exorbitant amount each year, including a rough estimate of $1 billion per week for direct workers’ compensation costs alone.

During a time where C-suite executives are looking for metrics and visibility that traditional safety training methods cannot supply, this company worked to update its training to deliver high-impact content in an accessible format that satisfied growing efficiency needs and safety concerns in the market. The employees’ retention of the information they learned through safety training increased by five times after two weeks when compared with learners who did not receive this training.

Measuring Impact

True learning (as opposed to rote memorization or passive understanding) can be the difference between life and death when it comes to safety training. User-friendly technology and modern, engaging content keep learners not only interested in the education they’re receiving but also safer in the workplace. With social commenting features and video-based learning, organizations can leverage the latest technology to ensure people are learning, not yawning, during their safety and compliance trainings.

The most effective learning platforms meet the following criteria:

• Easily adaptable and able to launch in minutes
• Memorable, short and modern
• Keep learners interested in the education they’re receiving so they can remember information through interactive commenting, engaging their mental capabilities
• Empower positive behavioral change by delivering immersive learning with activities, educational games, simulations and storytelling to captivate workers

When organizations follow these criteria, they can track the success of their training in a couple of distinct ways. For example, by delivering holistic, modern training, organizations can improve their bottom line, increase employee retention of the information and increase employee engagement. By implementing training and retention programs into company culture, companies help employees be more productive at work. In an environment where employees are constantly learning, they are empowered to create a cadence of success in the workplace.