How to Promote Workplace Safety Ideas
Workplace safety is important not only when it comes to avoiding fines, lost time, shutdowns and lawsuits, but also in keeping your employees feeling safe and satisfied with your company. Unfortunately, despite the importance of employee safety programs, it's hard to get employees to get particularly excited about the topic. That's why it's a good idea to find safety awareness ideas that will attract your employee's attention so they are more engaged with your safety measures.
Many of the safety program ideas involve games wherein one person or team receives a prize. If you want your team to be excited about the game, it's important to make the prize something they'll care about. While this could mean a gift card or cash, it could also be something like a catered lunch in the office. You can even offer something that won't directly cost you anything, such as an extra-long lunch or the chance to leave early from work.
Set up a list of scavenger hunt items related to your workplace's safety routines, such as emergency exit signs, fire extinguishers, emergency eyewash stations, etc. Then write easy-to-solve, but slightly cryptic hints to help your employees figure out which items they need to find. Break your group into teams and give the team who finishes the scavenger hunt first a prize.
You can promote safety awareness topics in many ways using trivia games. In one game, you can just write down a bunch of questions related to your company's safety procedures and operate with a standard trivia-night format, awarding the team or individual with the most points a prize.
Alternatively, you can host your trivia contest like a raffle, putting up one safety reminder in the break room on Monday and then removing it Tuesday morning. Then, on Friday, give everyone a pencil and a small sheet of paper and ask them to write their name on the paper and answer a trivia question based on your Monday safety reminder and then hand it in. Enter everyone who correctly answers your question in a raffle and then pick a winner by the end of the day. Repeat this game with a new safety reminder each week to continually get your team thinking about safety.
Sure, anyone could watch a safety video, but your employees will feel a lot more engaged if they're tasked with making their own video filled with workplace safety awareness tips. That's because while watching videos makes them a student, creating videos makes them the teacher, requiring them to really think about how to effectively communicate the safety concepts that are most important to them.
You can break the employees into teams and offer a prize to the team with the best video. Screen everyone's videos in the group before awarding a prize so your employees get the benefit of teaching while making their video and then learning by watching everyone else's videos.
While they're fun, not all safety promotion ideas can be games. It's also important to conduct regular training sessions to help emphasize all aspects of safety in the workforce. These can be once a month, once a week or every few months depending on your staff size and the number of dangers associated with your workplace. You may want to hire guest speakers and safety experts to add some variety in order to help keep the discussions interesting.
Consider creating a theme for each session, such as "hazard identification and risk assessment", "concern reporting", "earthquake safety procedures", etc. Be sure your employees not only know all of your basic safety procedures, but also what to do in emergencies and how to recognize and report potential hazards.