According to the the research paper "Relative Effectiveness of Worker Safety and Health Training Methods" from the American Journal of Public Health in February 2006, engaging safety training is three times more effective than the least engaging methods in promoting knowledge and skill acquisition. In addition, the most engaging methods of safety training are, on average, most effective in reducing negative outcomes such as accidents.
If you're in charge of writing the next safety message or safety slogan for your company's safety initiatives, you know that you've got a challenge ahead of you. After all, most safety slogans become invisible and ineffective pretty quickly.
When it comes to safety, no company wants to see staff hurt or property damaged.
In the book, Positivity, by Barbara Fredrickson, she discusses a fascinating research project about what makes businesses successful.
Many safety professionals believe they need to reward staff to get them to behave safely.
In the book, A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, he compares both the left and right hemispheres of the brain and discussed that you need to include both hemispheres when creating anything new.
Since we were little, the majority of us have been taught to look out for what is going wrong and fix the problem. This can be for anything from getting an "E" at school to having friendship issues.
In the brilliant book, Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, they discussed a 1999 research project by a team of Israeli researchers. In this study, 200 award winning ads were classified into six templates.
They then classified 200 unsuccessful ads and found that only 2% could be classified into the six templates.
But wait there's more...
The researchers brought in three groups of novices and got them to create three ads for three different products. The first group received information on the products and no ad design training. The second group was trained for two hours by a creativity instructor, while the third group was trained for two hours on the six templates.
For all groups, the best best ads were selected by a creative director and tested with consumers.
Many companies often get frustrated about how their workplace training is inconsistent from site to site, despite trainers using the same training materials.
Now that you have worked out your topic for your next routine workplace safety campaign, it's time to sit down and start writing. Here are some tips that have been designed for routine workplace communication initiatives (and not for large safety communication programs that require a lot of change, for large scale initiatives go to "14 Tips to Launch a New Safety Initiative").