Building a safety culture in your organisation, where employees understand what procedures they must take to be safe and how to report any hazards should be one of your top priorities. Companies can often find it difficult to keep employees motivated when it comes to workplace safety, but by taking a more creative approach your messages and training will be more engaging and is more likely to get through and stay fresh in peoples minds. Our latest article gives you ideas on innovative ways to spread your health and safety message to ensure a safe environment for all.
Lunch and learns
One way to give time-crunched employees more chances to participate in health and safety messages is to offer events where they can eat lunch while listening to an informative lecture or presentation. Lunch and learns can be a good opportunity for people within the organisation to share their expertise, but you can also bring in guest speakers.
Gamification
This innovative training method gets inspiration from game apps to create, operate and manage distance learning courses in a specific-game mode. The process involves the use of puzzles, quizzes, and games to make the learning experience engaging and fun. Apart from making the learning process more jovial, this gamification approach accelerates and smooths the memorisation of learners.
Case studies or role-playing
Case studies and role playing are two training techniques that can be fun and effective ways to help employees develop new skills and knowledge. Case studies involve presenting employees with a real-world scenario or problem and asking them to analyse and solve it. This technique can help employees develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and can also help them to see how the skills they are learning can be applied in a practical setting.
Role playing involves asking employees to act out a scenario or play the role of a specific person in a simulated situation. This technique can be especially effective for teaching communication and conflict resolution skills, as employees can practice interacting with each other in a safe and controlled environment.
Trivia quizzes
Workplace trivia quizzes are one of the most popular forms of fun training games for employees, to convey your health and safety message. They’re entertaining, challenging, and guaranteed to make everyone laugh, but remember to try to keep the quiz game light-hearted since it can get pretty competitive and heated at times!
Use multi-media
People learn in different ways. Some prefer videos and diagrams, while others respond better to a more traditional lecture format. Try to mix things up with a bit of both, using film clips, photos, YouTube, and charts to bring home your point. Music can also set the mood and get trainees energised before your session and during breaks. Play something upbeat to get them going in the morning, and lower it back down to let them know it’s time to start.
WhatsApp for toolbox talks
Conducting a toolbox talk is very important on-site and is one of the proactive measures to prevent accidents in the workplace. WhatsApp is becoming increasingly popular in the workplace as a way for colleagues to communicate with each other and the mobile messaging app can be a really good way for team members to stay in touch and receive messages quickly. The added bonus is the ability to get read receipts which can offer an audit trail of who actually read the message, if needed.
TikTok
With the rise in popularity of TikTok, videos could become essential in communication. Visual images get to the brain much faster than text, and TikTok in particular may be more engaging for both employees and businesses when used to communicate business announcements such as health and safety content and training. It has been proven that visual information gets to the brain 60,000 times faster than text and 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Also, people only remember 10% of what they hear after three days, but if a relevant image is paired with that same information, then retention rockets to 65%. So, it would be a given that humans absorb visual communication much better than a block of text.
By finding innovative ways to spread your health and safety message, there is huge potential to make health and safety training more engaging and focused, with the ability to drive behavioural change in people. For further information please contact us here.