For any modern business, one challenge that you may face is making healthy and safety teaching stick. People will often judge their own competence and take risks to get a job done faster. When those risks become too severe though; it can cost both employee and employer dearly. This is why, in any modern workplace, you should be looking to do all that you can to make health and safety a fun experience. To do that, you should look to utilise the modern art of “gamification” to do so.
Gamification is all about making the learning progress feel like a game. With rewards and benefits for progress, you make people more likely to want to take part. If they gain more from the learning process than just cold, hard information, they are more likely to utilise those details and learn from it.
How, can you make gamification part of your health and safety training?
Some fear that this might trivialise the importance of learning. However, that is not the case: gamification makes the learning more likely to stick in the mind. By making the learning fun, you make it much more likely that; in moments of need, such health and safety training is remembered and then used accordingly.
Health and safety: too serious to be a game?
Of course, it’s important to remember the vital importance of health and safety. The use of a fun nature to each exercise, though, is far more likely to make people want to learn. If they feel engaged in the learning, they’ll remain more likely to retain the information. They will be more likely to want to uphold the standards they learn, as they will be more likely to associate their training with having fun. It’s about offering each member of staff a more engaging way to learn.
Often, the best way to do this is by creating a more enjoyable learning experience. The best way to do this, usually, is to allow the gamified nature of your health and safety training to go out into the actual workplace. You don’t need to just make training fun, but day-to-day upholding of health and safety standards also.
Try and create a league table of sorts, with points provided for each person who takes part. Each action gives X points, and the person with Y points per month will ‘win’. They could win a series of potential rewards which are suited to your industry.
It could be everything from leaving an hour earlier to a day’s holiday if they do it several months in a row. The aim is to find a way to make people want to be competitive and to have some fun trying to out-do one another. If you do this for long enough, they will have some kind of genuine reason for taking part.
If health and safety feels like a dull necessity, some will skip corners. If you make it a requirement to help earn even more out of the workplace, though, more staff will give it their all.