8 Ways to make your safety training more engaging

Many workers don’t view safety training as the most enjoyable part of their jobs. While they may recognize its importance, especially if they’ve experienced potential hazards firsthand, it’s uncommon for an EHS professional to address a room of highly enthusiastic trainees.

Fortunately, workplace safety training can be both engaging and enjoyable. The importance of the material and how effectively trainees can engage with it influence their interest and participation.

Injecting some entertainment into a lesson will likely make it more effective. Research shows that humor-filled talks and hands-on activities are better than traditional lectures. They can help adults pick up new knowledge and skills. If we consider our most memorable classroom experiences, they likely involved the topics we still retain today.

Knowing how to make workplace safety training topics more fun and engaging, even if there aren’t many new and “exciting” safety standards to discuss, is essential for knowledge retention. Here are a few ideas that will have your workers looking forward to every session you plan.

1. Find great examples

Consider times you enjoyed learning difficult, technical, or boring material. Depending on when you grew up, you may fondly remember Bill Nye the Science Guy, Reading Rainbow, Wishbone, and a host of other educational programs. Few kids were excited about studying science or literature from a textbook, but these shows made those topics memorable.

For a little more ‘grown-up’ inspiration, think about the more educational shows and movies you’ve watched. Mythbusters or Cosmos may come to mind, as well as a myriad of documentaries. Distilled down to their technical topics, these programs wouldn’t offer much in the way of entertainment. Due to their incorporation of humor and accessible information, though, they have all been highly successful.

2. Use humor

Humor can be a powerful tool, especially when addressing an audience that may anticipate a long or dull session. Introducing a lighthearted remark at the beginning of a presentation can help engage and captivate the audience. Novelty enhances learning experiences, and few things are more memorable than a good joke or funny situation. EHS leaders should develop lessons that effectively incorporate humor, specifically tailored to highlight and address safety-related topics.

Don’t have many jokes up your sleeve? Consider a funny video, instead — either one your team creates or something relevant that already exists.

3. Consider different learning styles

Your group may consist of individuals with diverse learning styles. People have different learning styles: some learn best by seeing (visual learners), others by hearing (auditory learners), and some through hands-on activities (kinesthetic learners), For example, visual learners might prefer diagrams and videos, auditory learners may benefit from lectures and discussions, and kinesthetic learners often excel when they can touch and manipulate objects.

Given that most people exhibit a mixture of those traits, the most engaging safety sessions will involve multiple media. Instead of giving a long lecture with a Q&A, try using a mix of short talks, visual aids, and hands-on demonstrations.

4. Play games

Games create an engaging, low-risk environment for learning new information. They also provide immediate feedback and an opportunity for learners to fill gaps in their knowledge. Consider introducing an interactive game to run through safety training exercises and boost knowledge retention among employees with solutions like EHS Hero’s Behavior-Based Observations tool. If possible, include an incentive in your game structure to boost morale and collaboration among teams and motivate participation.

5. Get the vets on board

People love to learn from respected peers, and it’s easy to respect long-established skills and experience. Even if you know the most about safety at your company, longstanding workers can also teach new hires.

When possible, encourage their participation in lectures and group discussions, and ask them to help during hands-on demonstrations. Likewise, you’ll eventually want to encourage those new hires to become safety trainers. The more we talk about, practice, and teach health and safety lessons—like lockout/tagout or the use of PPE—the more they stick with us. Psychologists often mention the Learning Pyramid, which suggests we remember just 5% of what we hear but up to 90% of what we teach others.

6. Offer incentives

Competing for rewards could be a great way to encourage attendance and active participation. By offering tangible incentives, such as gift cards, during quizzes and team activities, you can significantly boost employee engagement. To reinforce retention of the material, consider providing similar rewards for demonstrating safe behaviors in the weeks that follow.

7. Keep it brief

Employees will only retain the knowledge they put into practice. Drawn-out safety sessions may seem like a good idea when you’ve got a lot of material to cover, but it’s unlikely your workers will remember much past the first hour or two.

Schedule shorter, more frequent training sessions that combine new material with a review of what’s already been covered for a simpler and more practical approach. Reinforce these lessons by discussing them in daily meetings and on-the-job exercises, rather than waiting for the next formal training session.

8. Constant reinforcement

Practice makes perfect! Even a great safety training session will only stick with trainees if they quickly and consistently apply what they’ve learned to their daily tasks.

To reinforce these lessons, make sure supervisors discuss the same safety topics in their meetings and toolbox talks. Pass out safety surveys to see how well the information stuck. If your employees are dealing with hazardous materials and PPE, reinforce safe practices with scheduled preventative maintenance.

Lastly, people generally require multiple exposures to information to effectively retain it, and people may have different learning styles and preferences. So, offering a variety of delivery options and safety training materials can help accommodate different learning needs. Regularly reviewing and updating training materials can ensure they are relevant and effective.

It’s also beneficial to have pre-made training materials available, such as those provided by BLR’s EHS Hero, to save time and effort in creating training from scratch. Using PowerPoint slides, presentation scripts, handouts, and quizzes can provide a variety of engagement options for learners, which can help them stay interested and engaged in the training. Additionally, pre-made materials can help ensure that safety training programs are thorough and accurate.