Author: Mike

Making Workplace Safety Training Fun

Nothing is worse than having to sit through a boring safety training session after you have been working for eight to twelve hours. I always hated those end of shift training meetings that were held just to satisfy some requirement. Even worse were the classes held on what was supposed to be my day off.

Many workplace safety training sessions have more of a tendency to promote workplace violence than they do to inspire workplace safety. Let’s look at ways to improve the classes.

The first step is to understand the audience. These are hard working people who simply want to get the job done with the least effort and return to their homes and families able to enjoy their time off.

They are not generally people looking for ways to get hurt and cost the company money. Unfortunately, many workplace safety training classes I have attended seem to make the assumption that these people all have a death wish and we have to train them not to exercise that desire here at work.

If workers are taught the right way to do their jobs, they will be much safer and more productive at the same time. Use the safety training sessions as a time to show the workers the proper and safest ways to do their work. Don’t focus on the list of things not to do. Focus the training on the ways to do the job safety and correctly.

To add some humorous contrast to the class, do a skit where the job task is done hilariously wrong. Just be sure to follow this up with a skit where the job is done right. Make sure the workers leave with the right way to do the job fresh in their minds.

Conducting a class in this manner will do two important things for employee morale. First, if your skits accurately portray the job, then your employees will begin to believe that you actually understand what they go through on a daily basis. They will begin to trust you more.

Second, by showing them the right way to do the job, they will see that you actually care about their well being and are not simply concerned with how much money they might cost you when they get hurt.

To provide truly effective workplace safety training for your employees, respect their time. It is not enough that they are getting paid to be there, they want to feel that they are actually learning something of value. Make the training meaningful. Make the training relevant. Most of all, make your workplace safety training fun.

For more workplace safety training tips and ideas, see these articles: http://www.mikestrawbridge.com/workplace-safety-training.shtml