Welcome to Safeti School, were we crunch down Environment, Health and Safety learning into simple, bite-size snippets that you can use for your business.
In this Episode we outline 3 of our favourite tips to help you boost the impact of your workplace health and safety training. Check out a couple of related resources below from the episode and the transcript if you would like to read the content.
Generational Learning Preferences – find out more about the preferences of a baby boomer, millenial or Gen Z’er when it comes to learning delivery.
More Health and Safety Training Tips – check out our guest blog from my buddy Alex Burbidge of Pro Safety Management
Free Risk Assessment Course – join our online workplace health and safety training course for free
Health and Safety Services – find out more about how Safeti can help you with Health and Safety
Safeti Shop – pay a visit to our store for professional templates and guidance
Safeti School – for more free, educational HSE content visit the Safeti School podcast page
Connect with Us – follow the Safeti page on Linkedin
Welcome to Safeti school where we crunch down health safety and environment learning in this simple bite-size Snippets that you can use for your business helping you improve your knowledge boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration. Let’s get started.
Hi there, and thanks for joining us in this episode. We’re going to give you three of our top tips to help you deliver better workplace health and safety training for your employees. You’ll have to excuse me if I cough or splutter during this during this session due to my current head cold or allergies, which it can’t seem to get rid of but will crack on.
So firstly in terms of looking at the planning of your training session, make sure that your content is pitched at a suitable technical level for your whole audience. This is quite key. Otherwise, you can lose either sections of your audience or your whole audience completely when it comes to delivery.
Make sure that the learning is developed according to their existing knowledge. It’s also equally important to understand that if you put groups of people into your training room that have a huge variance in terms of their existing knowledge.
Then the chances are that you’re going to either pitch your training too high or too low and lose one of those groups completely from your engagement.
Whenever you’re planning who is to receive the training, just be aware of that as well, I would say.
Make sure you’re not, for example, putting HSE professionals with you know, interns that have just come through the door and have no background knowledge or appreciation of the subject matter. This does happen quite a bit and it’s something that can be easily missed. Try not to fall into that trap would be my advice.
Secondly, whenever you’re considering your audience, I would pay some attention to the actual age of your audience.
And without wanting to sound ageist here, it’s well known that different generations have different learning preferences. It is a little bit of a murky area to consider but it’s just something to be aware of if you are training a group of people across a wide age range.
For example, Baby Boomers, they are said to be much more preferable or leaning towards the lecture style content and that type of learning whereas Generation Z’ers, who are those born after 1997 would most likely not dislike this approach.
They are much more keen to be involved actively and engaged with their learning process, whether that be through role play or participatory/practical activities and applications of that type.
I will put a blog post link where there’s summary, just for you to have a look at all the different generations and their preferences when it comes to learning. Hopefully that’ll help you!
Our next big tip then is practical application. Just leading on from what we were saying about the younger generations there. We’re often surprised whenever employees complete training, whether that’s online or in the classroom, and they appear to do well.
But when it comes to actually implementing what they’ve learned in the real world, they seem to struggle.
This is where we really need to push the envelope when it comes to helping our learners implement these new behaviors that they’ve learned in the classroom or by whatever means you have taught.
We do this by creating actually structured opportunities, either along the learning process and throughout the actual courses that you’re doing or thereafter, which then you can follow up on and check to see if they have applied what they’ve learned.
If you can think about some way that you can add an interactive follow-up, for example, or some sort of practical application where the group of learners can come together to reflect on how they’ve applied it. That type of approach that can be hugely valuable.
If you are doing face-to-face training, you can create role play scenarios and get people involved. If it’s online training you can get teams and departments to come together to discuss what they’re taking away from the online courses for example. Then they can discuss how they can use it to support the purpose of the business and so on.
One thing I would say as well is to make sure that is addressed, something we discussed a lot here at safeti.com, is the importance of soft skills. Whether that be leadership, negotiation & collaboration etc.
And what I would suggest is that when you’re putting in these practical applications, if you’re doing it in person. make sure to encourage those people who would potentially benefit most (i.e. those that seem a little bit reluctant) to lead the group during those activities. Give them give them a go at doing things. They maybe aren’t confident to doing and obviously that’s part of the process.
For example, if you’re doing a Conflict Management role play, consider putting the person who’s most reluctant into the main role if they’re willing. Then allow the rest of the group to support them in trying to resolve conflict and see how they get on.
Also as well as that, take every opportunity you can if you have learning groups that are coming together to work on certain activities. Bring them together and sharing their learning amongst their colleagues to make sure they’re learning from one another. This is really valuable.
Our last top tip today on this one is to make sure you pick the right person to deliver the workplace health and safety training.
Sometimes it’s difficult to get in-house support for this type of thing. But you really need to pick someone who’s quite passionate about the outcomes of the training, not just the subject matter itself.
Ideally, someone who has a vested interests and cares about the outcomes of those that are trying to learn. Particularly if someone has real-world experience with the subject matter, that can be really valuable or even just someone who can link the actual purpose of the training to the outcomes in reality.
That might be you that might be someone else new organization, or it could be someone such as myself who’s an external trainer, being brought into your business.
You need to deliver the training with passion and confidence to really ensure that those that are learning are convinced of the actual value of the content that’s being delivered. If you can’t convince them that what they’re learning actually matters, then I would argue that you’ve already lost the battle before you’ve even begun. So just bear that in mind is well
That’s it for three of our top tips on how you can make your training better and more effective. Make sure to check out a couple of the resources that I’ll post on the podcast page for this one, and hopefully, it’ll help you get a little bit more creative and help you along your way to produce better training. See you soon and good luck.
That’s it for this episode of Safeti school.
We hope this was helpful.
If so, please remember to rate,. review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes Google podcasts or Spotify. And remember, for more health safety and environment help, you can visit us at Safeti.com.
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