In the last two years, I have traveled significantly…have an elite status on three airlines and lots of frequent flyer miles. There are quite a few aspects of a trip that are routine and boring. One such thing is the safety announcement or video at the beginning of each flight. Why do they have it?
Now imagine you are on the US Airways flight that had to be crash-landed in the Hudson. Wouldn’t the instructions about emergency landing on water have been useful? I guess there is a reason landing on water is one of the scenarios in the airline safety announcement.
The reason frequent travelers ignore the flight safety announcement is normalization of deviation… you have seen the message so many times that it begins to lose impact.
I’m therefore very surprised that organizations believe they can achieve effective safety training by having “canned” refresher e-courses.
These refresher courses are equivalent of airline safety instructions!!! Unless refresher courses are made more engaging, they cannot be effective. If a worker is asked to take the same refresher course year after year, I’m afraid he will fall into a “listen-and-ignore” mode.
In follow-up posts, I will discuss ways of increasing learning impacts from training courses. As an example, take a look at a recent safety instruction video from Virgin America that is different from routine safety announcement.
Did you find the video engaging?
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