Safety Knows No Distance: Taking Safety Culture to the Next Level in a Distributed Team

Challenges of Distributed Teams: Remote Isolation and Office Routine

The rise of hybrid and remote work has reshaped the scope of occupational health and safety departments. Today, safety professionals oversee not only production sites and offices, but also employees working from home across multiple time zones—from Saint Petersburg to Khabarovsk and Yakutia. Direct supervision of their working conditions is impossible, while in-person training sessions and live discussions are hindered by time differences.

Drawing on a case study from GEROPHARM, Fire Safety and OHS Specialist Valeriya Borisova examines a dual engagement challenge. Remote employees feel disconnected from the company and treat safety briefings as a mere formality: materials are skimmed just to pass the test and are quickly pushed out of mind by daily tasks. At the same time, on-site and office staff grow fatigued by familiar in-person events. To equalize access to knowledge and overcome inertia across both groups, the company launched an asynchronous online program built around game mechanics.

Gamified Learning Architecture: A Detective Quest and a Visual Novel

Gamification solves two instructional challenges at once: it creates a safe environment where mistakes are allowed and provides 24/7 access to training without scheduling constraints. By experiencing the consequences of poor decisions through a character, employees internalize cause-and-effect relationships before facing real-world risks. The program features two digital formats.

Accident Investigation Chatbot Quest

The first tool runs on the VKontakte and Telegram messengers. Behind the detective storyline lies an actual workplace accident investigation procedure. Completing the quest takes 20–25 minutes, and the session can easily be paused at any moment—for instance, right before a meeting—and resumed days later.

• Assessing initial response and first aid: the player reviews witness dialogues, identifies who called the ambulance, and checks an employee's actions against a built-in visual algorithm to spot missed steps.
• Gathering evidence and exploring protective equipment: by interviewing a manager and analyzing CCTV footage, participants solve logic puzzles, including examining how self-rescuers work—for remote employees who do not see this equipment in the office, tips and videos on choosing such devices for home use are included.
• Final report as an arrowword puzzle: by cross-referencing facts with the testimony of the injured worker after they regain consciousness, the player uncovers a keyword, reinforcing the importance of interviewing eyewitnesses and never covering up minor injuries.

Visual Novel with Role-Playing Elements on Civil Defense and Emergencies

The second product is hosted on the corporate learning management system and turns civil defense and emergency response guidelines into an interactive comic with sound design. Four modules cover civil defense warning signals, natural disasters, household hazards, and industrial emergencies.

At branching points in the story, the player chooses the protagonist's actions—for example, when caught in a tornado. A mistake depletes the character's health, triggers a breakdown of the consequences, and alters the ending. Additional tasks include matching hazards to shelter types and packing an emergency go-bag, where, contrary to participants' expectations, every single suggested item proves essential.

In-House Development, Overcoming Skepticism, and Results

The program was built entirely in-house without external contractors in time for the World Day for Safety and Health at Work. Draft scripts were generated using artificial intelligence, though the presentation specifically highlights the need for expert review: AI cannot replace a specialist's verification of safety compliance accuracy. The visual novel was assembled on the learning platform by the internal e-learning team.

The main hurdle during the April launch was not a lack of resources, but peer skepticism and a digital barrier among older employees. Informal ambassadors helped turn attitudes around: they were the first to complete the quest and began discussing plot twists with colleagues over lunch. Younger staff assisted older coworkers, often working through the tasks together on a single smartphone.

With voluntary participation and completion time credited as paid work training, more than 200 employees (around 16% of the workforce) joined within the first two weeks, and word-of-mouth recommendations subsequently expanded reach to roughly one-third of the company. Compared to reading standard civil defense and emergency instructions, attention retention rose noticeably: employees replayed the visual novel two or three times to explore different storylines. Discussions about the game between remote and office staff reduced feelings of isolation, and anonymous feedback showed that employees even began reconsidering their everyday household safety habits. The next step involves scaling this approach to environmental protection, cybersecurity, and fire safety, introducing regular mini-challenges, and analyzing common player mistakes to refine safety briefing programs.

What You Will Learn from This Session

• How to translate an accident investigation procedure and first-aid algorithms into a script for a 20-minute detective chatbot?
• What game mechanics can replace passive skimming of civil defense and emergency instructions with hands-on decision-making for natural, household, and industrial hazards?
• How to divide roles between an OHS specialist, an e-learning team, and AI to build a course with zero contractor budget?
• How to overcome employee skepticism during a voluntary rollout and engage older workers in mobile learning formats?
• How to use statistics on common player mistakes in quests and visual novels to identify weak spots in existing safety briefings?