Safety training, while important, has gained a bad rep among the trainees.
While many employees, particularly those that have faced or witnessed hazardous situations in the past, do understand the importance of safety training, rarely any employees are excited or enthusiastic about it.
As a result, most safety training programs are not engaging and their impact is questionable. While many treat safety training as a check in the box, ineffective safety training can lead to some very serious consequences for business and their employees.
Hence, it is important to ensure that safety training is equal parts engaging and impactful.
How do you do that? Here are a few ways you can get started:
Invest In Creating A Unique Experience
Chances are, many of your experienced employees have already taken some form of safety training, including the crucial respirator fit test, with one of their past employers. Hence, many may feel like they already know what is going to be taught during your safety training session.
While that may be true in some cases, it affects the interest and enthusiasm of the whole group of trainees.
With custom workplace safety training content, you can overcome this challenge.
Not just that, you can also make sure that the training curriculum feels more relevant to your employees/trainees by including real-life examples and case studies that feature instances involving your business.
This may just make your employees realise that their life may depend on taking the training seriously.
Introduce Interactive Scenarios
Traditionally, workplace safety training involved the trainees sitting behind a desk and looking at a video or a trainer talk about workplace safety procedures.
To say the least, this method wasn’t interactive and to be fair, it is very easy to get bored and disconnected during such a training session.
On the other hand, the modern approach to workplace safety training involves making employees act out scenarios that they may face in the field. This doesn’t just make the training experience a little more fun, it also engages them and creates a memorable experience that improves retention.
Not to forget, new experiences are associated with better learning. So, treating employees to a training experience that they have never seen before is bound to improve the impact of your training efforts.
Turn Experienced Employees Into Guest Lecturers
It is also a great idea to get your existing employees to deliver a safety training lecture. This is because such employees have:
- Already been through the training themselves, and know how it works
- Been involved on the frontlines and may have firsthand experience of the things that can go wrong when safety procedures are ignored
Professionals tend to listen to advice coming from veterans that have a collection of real life experience. Not to forget, training that includes real life examples feels more authentic and relevant.
Assess Impact
This is perhaps the most important step. Once you have delivered the complete training to a batch of trainees, it is time to assess their understanding, comprehension, and retention of information.
This will not just help you gauge the effectiveness of your training program, but will also help you prevent untrained trainees from going on a production line and potentially causing hazardous damages.
These assessments may also help you pinpoint the areas where your training curriculum or experience is falling short. If you are able to identify these areas, optimising them to improve the impact of your training should not be much of a challenge.
Conclusion
Workplace safety training does not have to be a mundane experience. In fact, with the right innovation and efforts, it can be turned into an experience that is as engaging as it is critical.