What’s the best way to communicate about health and safety?
Your Health and Safety team is excellent and motivated. You have robust protocols and documentation. Check and check.
But making sure your messaging is heard and understood by every worker has its share of challenges.
Reaching the entire workforce requires a mix of technology, visual aids, simulations, emergency drills, and two-way conversations. Every industry is unique. And every workplace is made up of a diverse group of individuals, all with different strengths, weaknesses, and ways of learning.
To help you refine your Health and Safety communication strategy, we thought it’d be a good idea to compile effective tips and best practices when it comes to communication methods.
Keep reading for 10 communication methods that will help your Health and Safety teams engage and inspire workers to keep each other safe.
Understanding health and safety workers
Leaders in Health and Safety (H&S) include safety officers, inspectors, risk management specialists, engineers, and healthcare consultants. These professionals make up teams that assess risks, implement preventive measures, and respond promptly to incidents.
The main roles and responsibilities of health and safety team members are to:
- Identify potential hazards
- Implement safety standards, protocols, and procedures
- Educate staff on best practices
- Promote safety culture and regulatory compliance
- Review workplace incidents and accidents
H&S is a high-responsibility, high-stress, and high-compliance line of work. Keeping safety procedures up to date and training staff on changing protocol is a continuous process. And risk of falling out of compliance is not only bad for business, it could directly lead to injuries or death.
Safety professionals are tasked with the difficult job of training a wide range of profiles on H&S topics. That’s why understanding effective communication is so essential throughout this field. These unsung heroes keep employees safe, but also the public and all stakeholders.
Alright! Enough background. Let’s get you what you came here for. Here are the 10 best communication methods for health and safety!
Effective health and safety communication methods
- Interactive Training Modules
Health and safety at the workplace is essential. It’s every company’s duty to keep their staff and any stakeholders safe.
The thing about health and safety training, however, is that it can often be…let’s just say “less than exciting”. It’s not that the content isn’t important, it’s that it may be repetitive and lengthy.
In order to keep training fresh and learners engaged, use interactive training modules that incorporate videos, quizzes, simulations, and role-playing to vary delivery methods.
- Regular Safety Briefings
Keeping workers’ attention in meetings seems to be getting harder and harder. Some experts believe social media is to blame. Anecdotally, I think we can all think of a time we’ve let the buzzing allure of Instagram or TikTok pull away our focus.
According to a recent U.K. survey, 83% of respondents openly admit to losing focus during in-person meetings. For online meetings, that number jumps to 85%!
For this reason, to get your H&S messaging across, conduct brief, focused meetings at the start of shifts or workdays. The shorter the better, as long as your points have been converted and understood by all participants.
Whether in-person meetings or virtual briefs, these short, focused time-slots give your organization the best chance to convey important information.
- Clear and Concise Messaging
Hand-in-hand with regular, shorter briefings, all messaging should be clear and concise. Whether that’s emails, texts, bulletins, memos, print or digital signage – get to the point quickly and clearly!
You don’t want people skipping important information because it’s long or confusing. Ensuring that all communications are simple and straightforward is no easy task. H&S professionals aren’t expected to be expert communication specialists. Use the resources available (whether internal communication teams or external help) to work with H&S teams to optimize safety messages and delivery channels.
- Use of Visual Aids
Along with text-based messaging, visual aids are a crucial component of workplace safety strategies. Posters, infographics, floor signage, and digital displays can be used to remind workers of safety procedures.
In order to present complex safety information in an easy-to-understand visual format, you can combine images, charts, and video while minimizing text. This makes a more inclusive, effective communication delivery that is easily understood and even crosses language barriers.
Place visual aids in high-traffic and key areas so that personnel and visitors have a continuous reference and reminder of health and safety protocol.
- Mobile Access to Safety Information
What’s more convenient than safety information accessed on your smartphone? Whether that’s training material or health and safety reference documents, a mobile digital workplace software makes it easy for workers to find what they need on a smartphone or tablet.
And don’t worry about the quality of digital or online training. Studies have shown that mobile learning is as effective, or even more effective, than traditional in-person training.
- Feedback Mechanisms
When it comes to safety, transparency is key. Any and every problem or instance of non-compliance needs to be documented and communicated to the health and safety team through the appropriate communication channels.
Workers may often leave small issues unreported. They think, “Why go through all the time and trouble of filing a report?” But H&S teams must insist that everything is reported. That’s why incident reporting needs to be easy, intuitive, and streamlined.
Using a digital workplace solution, reporting tools can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Reports can be documented in seconds with digital forms and checklists.
On top of incident reporting, for non-urgent matters, employees can take advantage of digital surveys and suggestion boxes, online employee feedback forms, and online discussion boards among each other.
- Gamification and Incentives
Gamification can help learners be more motivated to complete training. It’s also shown to make training less boring for most learners – that’s a major plus for topics that might traditionally come across as dry. Especially with the next generation of workers, relying on gamification and making training “fun” is important to connect with changing learning styles.
Health and safety management and trainers can take advantage of digital gamification tools to build dynamic learning experiences. Things like quizzes, challenges, rewards, and even leaderboards can boost motivation and knowledge retention.
- Peer-to-Peer Learning
Peer-to-peer learning means that employees use their knowledge and experience to teach other employees. In other words, staff outside of the Health and Safety teams would be tasked with providing training and learning support.
In order to teach something, you have to really understand the topic. What better way to get people involved in health and safety topics than to have them dig into the nitty-gritty, and pass along all they’ve learned!
- Emergency Drills and Simulations
Fire drills aren’t just for school children! If your workplace isn’t conducting regular emergency drills, there’s no better time to start than now. Fire, and other emergency evacuation drills, are proven to save lives.
Depending on your location, industry, and facility type, you may require various types of emergency plans and associated drills. If certain drills are not possible, or too dangerous, to practice, consider the use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) simulations.
- Personalized Learning Paths
As we touched on, your company is made up of diverse individuals with a range of roles and learning styles. Not only that, every employee has a different career progression plan and employee journey.
Just like the diversity of roles, health and safety training can differ among employees even in the same team. Depending on their function and responsibilities, the mix of health and safety procedures they follow will be unique to them. For example, a welder on the shop floor will have a different H&S training profile compared to an in-office desk-based worker.
The most convenient way to develop and disseminate personalized training is through a learning management system (LMS) for employee training for health and safety. Health and Safety managers can easily assign, create, and tailor specific courses for each individual learner. On top of that, progress and completion data can be easily monitored and approved at your fingertips.
Technology enhances workplace safety communication
In today’s diverse workforce, health and safety professionals must embrace technology to effectively reach all employees. More than ever before, organizations are made up of a mix of remote, hybrid, frontline, in-office, and off-site workers.
A digital workplace LMS allows H&S and Learning and Development (L&D) leaders to easily implement employee training and track the learning process for each individual.
Accessible from anywhere, on company-issued or personal mobile devices, your employees have the flexibility to complete their appropriate training when and where they want. Finding reference documents, safety policy, procedures, and protocol is also streamlined, with everything centralized to one place.
When it comes to gamification, peer-to-peer learning, and interactive training modules, a comprehensive LMS makes it easy to connect employees and encourage collaboration and engagement.
Optimize your health and safety communication
With the 10 communication methods we’ve highlighted above, technology can help health and safety teams get their message across in a clear, convenient, and efficient way to all employees.
Your staff, and all stakeholders involved with your organization, will be best equipped to do their jobs in a healthy and safe way.
Want to learn more about integrating the most effective communication methods for health and safety? Reach out to one of our experts today.
FAQ
How can employers ensure that health and safety information reaches employees in real time?
Organizations can leverage technology, like a health and safety LMS, to deliver real-time alerts and updates to employees. Through a digital platform or mobile employee app, alerts can distribute vital information that reaches employees when they need it most.
What role does documentation play in ensuring compliance with health and safety regulations?
Documentation plays a crucial role in demonstrating compliance with health and safety regulations. A health and safety LMS can help organizations to be compliant by keeping tabs on documentation of training activities, communication between employees and supervisors, and tracking of compliance metrics, all located in one easy to access location.
