When you mention the words safety training, do you hear an audible groan from your team of employees? Compliance training is a necessary part of safety for many companies, but it often feels like a hassle to complete the requirements.
Boost Employee Morale
Right now is the perfect time to change your employee’s opinions about safety training from usual dull sessions to fun safety training. A few simple tricks can infuse excitement and fun into these training sessions, helping to boost employee morale. Instead of people falling asleep during the training meetings, they will be sitting on the edge of their chairs fully engaged in the information.
These strategies are essential because employee morale has a direct impact on job satisfaction. If you want to improve retention, then you need to find ways to make boring activities seem fun for the group.
Fun Safety Training Tips
Here are a few fun corporate training ideas that you might consider to spice up your training meetings:
Play a Game (Gamification)
A little bit of healthy competition is a great way to encourage individuals to be engaged in the training. Offer rewards, set up teams to compete, and gamify the process in a way that will resonate with your team. For example, you might consider offering candy bars or a few extra hours of time off for the winning team.
Encourage Active Communication
How often do employees show up to training, and then simply zone out because they aren’t actively involved in the conversation? Instead of talking to disengaged employees, open up and invite them to join in the conversation. One method on how to make online training fun is by implementing an online training program that people can use to interact with the training material and other people in the office.
Don’t Take it So Seriously
While safety training is a serious topic, it doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh a little bit during the training meeting. Look for funny videos or pictures that are related to the subject. These things can lighten the mood and get people talking and laughing.
Multiple Forms of Learning
People learn in different ways, so you should provide opportunities that will resonate with various learning styles. Bring in props or visual aids that will capture the attention of the group. Ask people to stand up in front of the group and show how certain things work in their department.
Tell a Story
Employees will be interested in workplace safety training if they can see how the strategies apply to their situation. Sharing stories will help people to connect and pay attention to the message. At the same time, stories help the lessons to be long-lasting for each employee.
Use great examples
If you are looking for examples of how to inject fun into the workplace, remember the days you enjoyed studying challenging, technical or even boring content? Do you remember Bill Nye the science guy and other other educational programs depending on when you grew up? Few kids want to learn science or literature from a textbook, but these shows were hits because they made them enjoyable and connected.
Think of the Mythbusters. Distilled to their technical subjects, none of these programs can offer much entertainment. However, when they used narration, jokes and digestible factoids, they were hits.
Offer some incentives & rewards
There’s no shame in winning! Competition will bring out the best of us and rewards are a great way to inspire active participation, not just attendance. Give gift cards, company credit or other tangible rewards during quizzes and team games and watch the employees’ engagement skyrocket. In the following weeks, suggest similar benefits for healthy behavior.
Be brief
Employees can hold only the skills they practice. Drawn-out safety sessions can sound like a smart idea when you have plenty of material to cover, but it’s doubtful your staff will remember the first hour or two.
A more practical (and logistically feasible) solution is to plan more regular, brief training, each of which is part of new material and sections. Encourage encouragement by raising these subjects in regular conversations and on-the-job drills, rather than only waiting for the next structured training session.
Reinforce your training
Safety training can only have a lasting impact on trainees who apply the lessons to their daily activities instantly and regularly. Practice makes perfect.
To help your lessons, ensure your managers discuss the same subjects in their own meetings and one on ones. Provide surveys to see how well the details stuck. And if the workers handle dangerous equipment and PPE, reinforce good practices with scheduled preventive maintenance.
Consider a centralized electronic system to handle all of your safety-related data. People need several information exposures to maintain it, and that’s only possible when information is readily available.
Conclusion
If you are having a hard time with your safety training, then it is time to apply some of these ideas to improve your training class. A few simple changes can go a long way to help your employees stay interested in the information.
Here at Coggno, we want to make it fun and easy for you to maintain compliance with required safety training. You will see that our training videos are engaging and interesting for the employees, helping to improve the skill set and morale at the same time.
