A safe and healthy workplace is not only important to the
wellbeing of your employees but to the success of your business. In fact,
creating a safe work environment can mean the difference between profit and
productivity and one crippled by workers compensation, medical costs and even
worse. So, it stands to reason that the company safety program meshes
seamlessly into the overall culture of the business. Employees “own it” and are
all vested in its success. Yeah, right.
Safety is serious business; it’s about following rules and
complying with procedures; it’s about mandatory monthly safety meetings where
those rules and procedures are reviewed over and over again. It’s about best practices and being prepared
for the unexpected.
With so much at stake, your entire work force needs to
understand and buy in to the company’s safety objectives and the safe behaviors
that are expected of them. To make that happen, safety training needs to be
memorable.
One way to do that is to make your company’s safety training
an experience. Scrap the meetings where everyone sits and listens. Mix things
up. We all learn in different ways. Listeners prefer lectures and group
discussions. Others – visual learners – like images, graphs and maps to tell
the story for them. Did you ever notice any of your colleagues constantly
taking notes? It could be that’s how they best process information. And then
there’s the person always taking things apart and trying to figure out how they
work using the hands-on approach. Does
your current training program address all of these styles? If not, your message
could be getting lost on more than half of your audience! Not good when it
comes to safety.
Think about including something for everyone in your
training; maybe a short lecture, a video, an interactive skit; create a song, a
demo, an actual walk through of a situation – anything that gets your people
engaged in maintaining a safe working environment for all. An investment in your training program can
lead to a rich future.
Posted by MJ Thomas