In this Episode of Safeti School, we chat about some of the common pitfalls that we fall into with your health and safety training delivery. Don’t make the same mistakes that we did!
We’ve teamed up with
Alex Burbidge from Pro Safety Management for a few episodes to share our views on a range of topics. We hope you get bucket loads of value from these short podcasts.
Want to read? Please scroll down for the transcript version of this podcast if you’d prefer to read today or just use it as a reference when listening to the audio!
Training Delivery; Additional Resources
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3 Essentials for Effective Training
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If you would like to read the transcript, you can watch our video below or read on further down the page!
Training Delivery Episode Transcript
Welcome to Safeti School. Where we break down health safety and environment learning into simple bite-sized snippets that you can use for your business or your career. Helping you improve your knowledge boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration.
Let’s get started.
RICHARD Let’s look at how we can avoid the pitfalls when we’re delivering training Alex.
We’re going to talk through you are sort of favourite little points that we reckon people can think about. Through experiences of her own and areas where we’ve maybe had a mishap in the past ourselves. Do you want to kick us off?
ALEX Yeah for me. It’s always about your own nerves and you know you overthinking what you’re delivering and sometimes the information that you’re presenting is just got to be told. It’s got to be delivered but it’s just your style and personality.
I think people want to see rather than just trying to be either too corporate and too kind of like into the business buzzwords. Just be yourself, deliver something that you know,you would be happy to sit through yourself.
That’s the test.
I think.
RICHARD That’s the acid test to make sure to keep your audience engaged.
It’s a real pertinent point to try and be as natural as possible and I guess we chatted with this in the past that once you start overthinking everything that you’re saying then automatically it becomes unnatural and then that in itself is damaging to your engagement.
Something that I’d been thrown in this initially was just to make sure that you have a defined outcome. It goes back to what we’re discussing about planning training. To make sure that whatever goals and objectives that you want the learner to achieve are clearly laid out so that whatever direction you’re training goes in that you can always bring it back to that objective and make sure that whatever content your delivering or whatever discussions that you’re having.You can always make them relevant to that end goal. Would you have any thoughts on that or experiences from that point of view?
ALEX Yeah, because the learning outcome is that you want to pass on your skill or some knowledge. So, you might be helping them towards sitting an exam or creating a project or doing something else and you’ve got to kind of re-emphasize the learning objective otherwise you kind of saying, well, I’m just going to give you all this information and now I’ve ticked the box. People no straight away that you’re doing that but if you’ve got an outcome and you’re taking them on a journey like a Learning Journey. You know, I like my films so you’re taking them on a film.
You’re telling them, what’s going on. You take them through the kind of, any good Hollywood movie has a script, taking them through a bit of a journey and your either trying to get somewhere or you’re trying to help them think differently. So just always go back to that kind of purpose that you talked about, that objective, that learning thing.
RICHARD I think that that ties in well to I suppose what I mentioned about cognitive overload and giving too much information. Obviously in this digital age. Our attention spans are becoming less and less able to cope with in a vast amount of information. I suppose the question to ask yourself. If you are building that story like you’re saying, is how are you maintaining engagement through your training process.
Have you broke it down into manageable chunks? So that you can you know test people’s knowledge. You can give them a thumbs up once they’ve grasped a certain aspect of your training and keep that motivation through your whole training.
ALEX I can’t say anything else on that, I think thats absolutely bang on. If you overload them with too much information particularly, if you have designed a course yourself, you know that hasn’t been tried and tested. A lot of people go in the HSE website, you find a lot of information, you know I’ve had this. People have sent me, examples.
Alex, do you think this is really going to stick? Is this really what people want to see? It’s just a complete regurgitation of the regulations or an approved code of practice that has been designed into a course.
I’m thinking, well, you know, in the nicest possible way maybe you should kind of split it up
and make this part the kind of bit that you really want them to focus on because a lot of that is going to switch them off and you’re going to lose your message and that opportunity for them to create that bit of knowledge and that new skill.
RICHARD Yeah, they got something as well for us to be aware of and especially as someone who’s been immersed in the subject matter for you know a long period of time to watch out for that curse of knowledge that people talk about where you end up basically just trying to show off how much you know about a particular subject rather than thinking about how it’s perceived by the person trying to learn.
That obviously should form a big part of your planning in terms of the content and also the delivery.
ALEX Yeah, I think maybe we hide behind you know, the technical aspects of safety that we know about or well-being or whatever it is. And you kind of think that’s a bit of a shield for you.
I mean, it’s Brene Brown talks about being vulnerable and this is the danger people don’t allow themselves to be vulnerable, you know when you’re presenting. If you are vulnerable people like that, they see the real you and actually the people in the audience.
They also drop their guards and they allow themselves to be vulnerable.
But if you stand up there and you kind of spill this stuff out and you know, we’ve all been there and a bit guilty of it. You don’t get that kind of richness in a room. So I think being vulnerable and just saying, you know what, we’re not going to cover everything but these are kind of key things. That I think goes down so much better.
RICHARD I think that’s awesome. That’s a really good point about you know, the vulnerability then being reciprocated by your audience which opens up a lot of conversation which otherwise wouldn’t happen. How does that then just to wrap us up Alex, do you think in terms getting feedback, getting valuable feedback. I mean obviously getting feedback in itself is valuable. Everybody should know that and there any tactics or strategies that you would use to make sure you’re getting valuable feedback.
Not just, I’m sure we all know the trainer who you know gives it every person in the class of wink and a nod and makes sure they tick the excellent 10/10 box just so they look good for he ever ever going to be reviewing it. But if were wanting constructive criticism,
Is there any particular way that you would go about trying to get that?
ALEX Yeah. Yeah.
I think the fear is, you fear negative feedback and you always want positive and if you’re running a consultancy or your jobs on the line, you’re worried. You just want to hit that performance target. What I’d say is all feedback is good feedback because you want to learn, you are growing yourself every time you present, you know, just pat yourself on the back. People don’t like presenting. There’s not many people that can stand up there for three or four days or even half an hour and present.
It takes someone to have real courage to do it, but it’s even more courage when you ask for feedback and don’t just, I think they call it a ‘smile sheet’. Basically when you hand out the feedback what you’re getting really, you’re getting instantaneous satisfaction and what I mean by that is you’re getting. It’s like when you eat a Mars bar, how do you feel?
Does it taste good? You know, you might not like a Mars bar. But anyway,it’s that instantaneous thing of, I’ve just eaten something or I’ve just learned something, do I feel good about it?
Is that satisfaction?
To capture that satisfaction whether it’s a negative satisfaction, you take it. But don’t go all ‘was the food nice?’, that’s just getting away from the fact. Instead ask, did I learn something that I can apply to my role? That’s a so much better question.
And that’s why you need to kind of build these questions sets into your feedback forms. As soon as the course is finished take that information.
RICHARD So there’s as much about asking the right questions as anything else then. I think we’re touched on a lot of good points there and I think you’re right, if you are the trainer. It does take a lot of courage and energy to get up in front of an audience. Especially if that audience isn’t fully bought into the process. So don’t be too hard on yourself as well.
That’s it for this episode of Safeti school.
We hope this was helpful. If so, please remember to 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. Until next time. Take care.
