Barbara Fredrickson is a social psychologist who has conducted extensive research into emotions and positive psychology.
In her book, Positivity, she talks about how being positive has the mind-broadening powers that allow us to be more creative.
Like daylillies, when the light is shining and we are happy we are more open to what is around us, our world literally expands and we see possibilities. But when darkness falls, just like the daylilly that closes up, we feel alone, unable to see our bright future and despondent.
Research studies have found that when you are positive it feels good because you are literally substituting negative thoughts for happy thoughts.
But that’s not all, being positive changes the boundaries of our minds, expanding what we believe is possible. This in turn transforms our future, as our positive thoughts literally build up our resources (from sleeping better, having closer relationships) so that when the inevitable challenges do occur we are better equipped to handle them.
She suggests that to lift our moods to being more positive, we need to increase our positive thoughts to negative thoughts. And the ratio to strive for is 3 positive thoughts to 1 negative thought.
Positivity for Business
From a business perspective, it’s important for business leaders to look at ways to encourage staff, and themselves, to be more positive. This is because being positive:
Enables you to do what’s right for others, rather than for yourself.
Broadens the mind, by expanding the scope of your visual attention, so that it expands the conceptual connections you make. This makes us more creative, helping us to come up with more and better ideas. When you face problems, positivity makes solutions better.
Builds good physical health. People with high positivity scores have lower levels of stress-related hormones.
Builds connections with others, so that we have better interpersonal relationships.
Research has found that positive managers are more accurate and careful in making decisions, are more effective interpersonally, infect work groups with greater positivity which helps groups to work together better and faster. They also strike the best business deals during negotiations. In fact, business teams with a positivity ratio of 6 to 1 outperform all other types of business teams (read “Seven Factors behind creating a high-performance Business Team“).
Give Thanks
But it’s not just positive managers that can make a difference. Just by getting staff to think of positive things, before a meeting, this positivity enables them to bring more ideas and workable solutions to any problems discussed in meetings.
One such way to do this is at the start of a team meeting to express gratitude to work members who have undertaken or jobs well done. An example is “I appreciate Bob for helping out with my report on Monday which enabled me to meet the client’s deadline” or “Let’s be thankful team for the XYZ project we won last week”. Just by starting business meetings on a positive note, you will find that your meetings will run much smoother and staff moods will lift.
In the book, Positivity, by Barbara Fredrickson, she discusses a fascinating research project about what makes businesses successful.
In the mid 1990′s, Marcial Losada undertook extensive research into the characteristics of high performance business teams.
Behind a two-way mirror, his research team observed business meetings and tracked whether statements were:
Positive or negative
Self-focused or other focused
Based on inquiry (asking questions)
Based on advocacy (defending a point of view)
Teams were then classified into high-performing if they had high ratings for: customer satisfaction, profitability and evaluations by peers, subordinates and superiors.
60 business teams were researched and of these, 25% were classified as high performing, while 30% were poor performing.
When he divided the teams into high, low and mixed performance teams striking differences emerged.
What he found was that:
High performance teams had high positivity ratios of 6 to 1 (or 6 positive statements made to 1 negative statement). They also had high connectivity (which means they were responsive to one another) and they asked questions as much as they defended their own views. They also cast their attention outward, as much as inward.
Mixed performance teams had ratios of 2 to 1. As could be expected, mixed teams sat in between.
Low performance teams – had ratios well below 1 to 1, they were far less connected to one another, asked almost no questions and showed no outward focus (Sound familiar? I’ve attended meetings like this and I wondered how that business managed to stay in business).
High performance teams really did outperform the other teams in more ways than one. And while other groups crumbled under pressure, these teams carried on, asking questions, thinking through ideas and working together for a successful result. They were more flexible and resilient.
The bottom line is that positivity is linked with business success. And for business teams to be successful, they need 6 positive to 1 negative comments.
Speaking Up
In “Candor, Criticism, Teamwork” written by Keith Ferrazzi for Harvard Business Review in January 2012, other research has also found that high performance teams have high levels of candour among team members. High candour workplaces have colleagues speak honestly about the risks involved and other issues, rather than talking behind people’s backs. While it is understandable that people prefer to avoid conflict, it’s debilitating for organisations. Lack of candour contributes to slow decision making and longer cycle times. The higher the candour, the better the business performance.
But a high candour workplace needs the right organisational culture to allow it to flourish. In fact, low candour workplaces signify a highly politicized workplace where people do what they told and do not question anything.
Seven Steps to a High Performance Culture
The seven steps to creating a high performance team and culture is by encouraging team members to:
Focus on positive statements, while only using a negative statements if it helps clarify an issue (6 to 1).
Focus on what is best for the company or group rather than overly focusing on themselves.
Ask questions when they do not understand issues or someone’s point of view (rather than openly criticize).
Defend their point of view provided that it is for the best interests for the group, rather than for their own personal agenda or pride.
Form smaller groups (5 people or less) so that opinionated people do not dominate. A spokesperson can be nominated to report back to the larger team.
Designate a “chairman” who notices when something is being left unsaid or someone cannot get their say and encourages people to speak or cover issues that are being ignored.
Start sentences with “I might suggest…” rather than openly criticizing the person.
High performance teams occur when true collaboration and a positive environment is able to flourish. This occurs when people trust one another enough to speak with candour.
Tune in to the next week about why positivity is so important for personal success.
Many safety professionals believe they need to reward staff to get them to behave safely.
But we all know, that rewarding staff doesn’t always work. You often get great safety performance when rewards are on offer, but once the rewards stop, the safety behaviour drops back down to the previous level (or lower).
The Downsides with Rewards
In the book, Drive, by Daniel Pink he goes through a lot of research studies to discover when it’s best to reward staff.
Most business managers know that goals are an important business tool as they focus the mind on undertaking a particular objective. They help get things done. But care needs to be taken with what you get people to focus on.
When offered a reward on completion of a task, staff tend to focus on the reward, resulting in poor performance when undertaking the task. Offering a reward for performance encourages short-term thinking, cheating and unethical behaviour. I’m sure many of you have experienced working for a company offering a financial or a gift card reward for safety which resulted in incidents being omitted from the monthly statistics.
Other examples include Enron who set such lofty revenue goals that staff undertook risky, unethical sales behaviour that led to the company’s demise. While Ford released the Ford Pinto with a focus on producing a car on a certain date with a certain weight and price that it omitted important safety checks and unleashed an incredibly dangerous car (self-exploding vehicle, anyone?).
Pay me
If you pay people to lose weight, work harder or stop smoking, people will start doing the new behaviour that is required. But once they get their reward, they don’t continue. Money in itself isn’t a big motivator for improving performance or stopping an unhealthy habit.
However, it’s different for left-brain routine tasks, that do not require creative thinking. Research has found that rewards can actually boost productivity without harmful side effects provided that the work is monotonous. Examples include production line work (or putting letters into an envelope).
But for creative tasks, rewards actually decrease performance.
Pink says that if you do want to reward a design team for doing a good job, you must give them a reward after the task is done and it should be unexpected.
This is to ensure that staff focus on solving the problem, rather than the reward.
What’s a good reward?
When it comes to enhancing performance and motivating staff – the best reward is positive feedback. It might seem a bit “twee”, but we all like to hear we are doing a good job. And we’re not likely to cheat or exhibit unethical behaviour, just to hear our boss give us a good rap.
So long as the feedback provides useful information. Rather than saying “Wow. You designed a great safety poster”. Instead, give meaningful and specific information about how the poster met the objectives such as ” Wow. That poster you designed really hits the mark. It clearly communicates how to walk down stairs correctly”.
Four Tips to Communicate and Reward Safety Behaviours
If you have a new safety initiative that you need to communicate to staff and you know that there will be some resistance, use the following four steps to communicate and reward:
Explain why the task is important – You can make mundane tasks more meaningful by explaining why the task is so important and how it relates to a larger purpose. For example: “When delivering mail, it’s important to drive safely on your motorbike so that you customers get their mail on time and you return home in a healthy condition. After all, there are people depending on the postal service to get their paycheque and birthday present from Grandma. You don’t want little Billy missing out on his new Lego set”.
Acknowledge that the task is boring – Be empathetic that being safe might be boring and that they’ve heard the same things over again, but let staff know that it is important.
Allow people to complete the task in their own way – Give people autonomy. State the outcome you need, but where possible, let people do it in their own way. Give people freedom over how to do their own job. If necessary, give them the guidelines on what safety rules they need to apply, but let them figure out how to make this work. Once they have worked it out (and it’s working), create a document on what you want people to do (see “How finding company bright spots bring business success” for more information).
Give positive feedback – After staff have undertaken a procedure safely in the right manner, let them know the reasons why they did it so well. Make sure you give positive feedback one on one to all of your staff members. This can also be done publicly in meetings or through the company newsletter.
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.
Look to the Left
The left hemisphere is rational, linear, logical and analytical. It likes to analyses details. Those who are more L-directed thinkers are accountants, lawyers and engineers.
Look to the Right
While the right hemisphere is instinctive, empathetic, understands context (the left brain handles what is said, while the right focuses on how it’s said), non verbal and emotional cues. It sees the big picture. Those who are more R-directed in their thinking are entertainers, artists, designers and counsellors.
Get it all together
Both sides work together – but they have different specialties.
The left hemisphere knows how to handle logic and the right hemisphere knows about the world. Put them together and you have a powerful thinking machine. Get them to work separately and life becomes, well one-sided and a little strange.
Using Both Hemispheres in Training
Our education system has tended to focus and reward more L-directed thinking such as using exams as the only way for students to access University and teaching students by talking a lot at them. But we’re now moving away from the era of left-brain dominance in our society.
Now, more R-directed techniques are being such in education. These include using role plays, story-telling and getting students to build their own things rather than just being told how to make things.
So with training you need to appeal to both sides of the brain to maximise training outcomes. After all, Daniel Pink tells us that to obtain professional success and personal fulfillment, we need to start activating our right brain more.
Let’s take a look at producing an effective workplace training program that activates both sides of the brain (most of these you will already know about it, but you might not know why they work so well):
Right Brain
Tell stories – This provides an emotional connection to information. It represents a pathway to understanding that the right brain loves, while the left brain turns off. NASA uses story-telling in its knowledge management initiatives, while 3M gives its top executives storytelling lessons.
Use visuals – The right brain loves visuals and we learn much faster with visuals than with words. Include colourful diagrams, interesting training videos and photos.
Play – Make learning fun. Using humour and getting trainees to undertake role-plays gets great results. Consider including relevant video games for learning. In “What good are positive emotions” by Barbara Frederickson, she mentions that playing makes children joyful, which in terms make them open to exploring and learning. This holds true with adults.
Using demonstrations during training - Trainees learn better when they are shown what to do, but also when they are given a go and are coached on improving. Left brain thinking was all about telling students how to do something (maths lecture, anyone?), while right brain training shows and gets trainees to have a “play”.
Left Brain
Give a test – Sorry to say that you still need to test people. The left-brain needs to be involved. In fact, research has found that if you tell people before a training session or even watching a training video that they will be tested, trainees will remember more and get more questions right than those who were not informed of a test.
Provide information in a linear fashion – Our left brain needs order and understands information in a linear fashion. Go to non-linear and you lose people. This is why us humans love numbered lists on how to do something. Even a right brain training video needs information presented in a linear fashion to help the left brain understand information.
What other left brain/right brain activities do you like to include?
Now that it’s the start of a wonderful new year, we’ve put together our list of workplace safety trends for 2012.
Given the introduction of OHS harmonisation laws across most of Australia, this has formed the basis behind most of our hypotheses. However, we’ve also included other safety areas that have long since needed an overhaul.
Our predictions for 2012 workplace safety trends are:
1. Director’s responsibilities – Given the tough penalties corporate directors will face for unsafe workplaces, there will be a demand for executives to find out more about their responsibilities and what they need to do to improve their workplace safety. Expect to see a plethora of executive training courses on this subject. And executives out attending them (if they didn’t do this in 2011).
2. Safety communication initiatives – With the need to improve workplace safety, the majority of large companies will introduce large workplace safety initiatives to target areas that need fixing. Expect to see lots of workplaces bombarded with various communications. Unfortunately, most of these will be rushed, bandaid approaches, that will have little effect on improving safety.
3. More strikes on poor safety - Companies that allow poor workplace safety conditions to keep occurring will have a rough 2012. Thanks to workers at Baiada Chicken farms who have lead the way in complaining about workplace safety). Expect to see an increase in strikes due to poor safety (and also pay increases, but that’s another subject).
4. A decrease in deaths – 2011 saw a spike in unnecessary workplace deaths, particularly in Victoria, and in many other countries across the world. Given the need to focus on harmonisation and improve workplace safety, the amount of deaths will decrease. Time will tell as to how short-lived this will be (no pun intended).
5. An increase in mental health programs and awareness – Thanks to initiatives like R U OK day?, the National Mental Health reform program sponsored by the Australian Government and organisations like the CFA leading the way in providing access to a variety of mental health programs, organisations will start to realise the importance of good mental health. More importantly, these types of initiatives will allow people to realise that they might not be themselves and seek help. After all, it is only when people are self-aware that they will be able to get the help they need and do something to improve their lives.
6. Quad bike riders will have to wear helmets – I’ve ridden a quad bike, in an effort to round up cows on my parents-in-laws dairy farm. And it was terrifying. Now, I have to admit that I’m a city girl, and quite frankly, anything remotely rural scares me, but riding a quad bike up and down hills chasing stubborn cows wasn’t as fun as I’d hoped. I was petrified. How teenagers and adult riders can drive them without a helmet in this day and age, surprises me. After all, if city kids have to wear a helmet when riding a scooter on smooth city streets, surely those riding an open air quad bike on uneven ground have to wear one, too? After the high numbers of quad bike fatalities in 2011, finally, improved safety rules will be introduced for quad bikes across Australia.
In a recent online discussion with safety professionals from around the world, we discussed what types of visuals they use during their safety presentation training.
These visuals fell into a few different categories:
Shock photos (that often include death and lots of blood, to ‘scare’ workers into being safe),
Incorrect safety photos (that showed staff doing the wrong things),
Correct safety procedure photos (that show the right behaviour), and
Happy families and people (to show that being safe leads to a happy future).
Any of these types of photos can work. The only exception was that the group felt that showing incorrect safety procedures can be a sensitive issue in companies and was not recommended.
The reasons why these types of photos work can be found in the book Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath. It was stated that when people make choices they rely on two basic models – consequences and identity.
Should I or Shouldn’t I?
The consequences model is well known among economic students.
It assumes that when we have a decision to make, we weigh the costs and benefits of our options and make the choice that increases our satisfaction. It’s a very rational and analytical approach. It’s all about choosing the option that gives us the best value.
This is when we use photos that “shock” the person into safety by showing the result of an accident that could happen to them. It tries to appeal to their self-interest. Or we show the right way of doing a procedure.
With the identity model, however, people make decisions based on what they believe the person who they are would make the decision. They ask themselves “what would someone like me do in this kind of situation?”
With identity, this is getting people to think about a decision in terms of how it effects them through their group association. So it’s getting people to make decisions about about person they aspire to be (or who they already believe they are and how that person would make the decision (group affiliation includes race, religion, gender, class, occupation and countless other groups). For example: scientists would make decisions on how a scientist is meant to make decisions by gathering lots of facts and making an objective decision). This is when you show people what they want to be (ie: safe and happy families) according to which group they believe they belong to.
Encouraging group identity is important for any company. It’s all about your culture and getting your staff to align with your core values. Consider fostering a group identity that encourages looking after your mates, being a safe worker or doing things in a way that only special people can that work for your company (eg: IBMers have their own name and use their core values when making decisions). Then, you can use visuals that match group identity.
Which type of visuals do you like to use in your safety communication?
Training videos are a great way to get your important training messages instantly understood by your new starters, current staff and contractors.
However, most training videos miss the mark when it comes to aligning new staff with their core values and vision, as well as engaging new starters.
New employees are at their most teachable when they first start a job. This is an opportune time to explain the culture of the company, the type of work and outcomes that are expected and the company attitude towards safety.
Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, claims that what stood great companies apart from good companies was how deeply and consistently staff at the company lived, breathed and expressed the core values. At their best, core values give workers a framework for making the right decision that benefits the company. Safety excellent companies lead by their values than by rules. Rather than forced compliance, they lead by shared ownership of values whereby staff are empowered to make decisions.
In addition, senior leadership play an important role in establishing the culture of the company, including the safety culture. Safety excellent companies let new staff know from day one the importance of safety as they know that poor inductions undervalue the importance of safety.
Based on the information that makes good companies great, here are some key concepts that you need to include in your workplace training videos:
Demonstrate your core values – Talk about each of your core values and discuss what they mean and how they work. Why are they important? Give examples of how staff use the core values to make decisions that are right for the company.
Get senior leaders to introduce the video – Senior leaders are crucial in aligning staff with the goals, vision and core values. Film your senior leader welcoming new starters, explaining the need for the video, what they will learn, what the company is about, what’s important etc. Senior leaders are often travelling and out of the office, but having them chat in a friendly way to camera, makes them seem more approachable (and real).
Tell stories – Stories provide an emotional connection to information and provide a framework for staff to understand what is acceptable company behaviour and what is not. They are ideal to use when giving examples of staff doing the right thing, working hard to reach a goal and working together as a team. Work out which stories to use in your company in the article How to find the right stories for your Company.
Use animations – Animations can go where trainees can’t go. They are perfect for showing how the body works and how it can get affected poor lifting techniques and stress.
Credible spokespeople – Customers, clients and patients are surprisingly more effective in motivating people to work harder, smarter and more productively. Getting your end users to talk about how your products and services have helped them is a proven way to motivate staff.
Use quizzes – Quiz your learners after (or during) the video training. This makes sure they have absorbed the information. Use a quiz as a review tool. This is a great way to refresh staff. Even if they only watch a small segment of an induction training video (for example: warm up exercises, by undertaking a small quiz on this topic, you know that they have learnt the information). Interestingly, research studies point to high levels of recall and understanding of video, provided that viewers were told they were going to be tested before watching the video.
Include face to face time – Often, companies think because they have a training video they do not need a trainer to go through the information. This is a mistake. It’s still important to include face to face time so that the trainee can ask questions and get feedback on any tasks they are practising. Mind you, the face to face time will be sufficiently reduced, but it needs to be enough so that the trainee can engage more with the material. One good training methodology is to use the video as the main form of training (as opposed to a PowerPoint presentation) while a trainer moves progressively through the information, stopping to talk about the different topics. Done well, this can ensure consistent training across the company.
Spending the time developing the right content strategy for your training video will ensure it has longevity and that it is a highly effective training tool for your company.
Training videos are a highly effective way to get trainees to remember and understand information.
This is because they:
1. Are visually based - The majority of our brain real estate is devoted to processing visual information. Our brain loves visuals and learns much faster from pictures than words. We’re really good at remembering pictures and they draw our attention. Called the Picture Superiority Effect, we remember 65% of what we have learnt three days after, provided it is both a picture and a word shown together compared to 10% for just a word alone.
2. Use Audio and visuals together- Presenting information both audibly and visually reinforces information in multiple brain areas, this dual-encoding process increases the chance that material will be stored in long-term memory.
3. Are more engaging – If you’ve ever sat in a classroom with a teacher droning on and on, you know what I mean. Remember, when you were at school and how excited you were when the teacher said you were going to watch a “film”? This still holds true with adults and children alike. Provided that the training video is made correctly, and more importantly that trainees are told they will be tested afterwards, you will get high levels of understanding and recall (If students are told they are watching a training video and that’s it, they will learn less, better to tell them they need to do a short quiz, even if there isn’t one).
4. Go where trainees can’t go – This is where 3D animations surpass even the most brilliant teacher in helping trainees understand how the body works. It is so much easier to understand how poor lifting techniques affect the spine when you see an animated version.
5. Show demonstrations – Similar to an animation, well made training videos show how a particular process occurs. Rather than the trainee having to read or hear about it, they get to see what happens. This is really important for procedures that are difficult to show in a classroom environment (eg: doing a forklift safety check, operating the big machine that doesn’t fit in the classroom etc). This is effectively making an abstract concept (words about a process) more concrete (visuals) which helps people to better understand information. We learn by watching people doing things
6. Are quick – Properly produced a training video will explain information in about half the time as words alone. Using visuals helps people instantly understand information and results in less confusion.
7. Provides consistent training – Keeping strict version control on your PowerPoint training presentations and ensuring that your trainers are all teaching the same thing is a legislative requirement. If a death were to occur at your company site, the coronial inquest would request that the training materials used on the day the person was inducted and trained be submitted for review. If there is evidence that the PowerPoint version was open and anyone could change it or that the trainer did their own version of training, then that company would be found to be non-compliant training wise. Ensuring consistent company training is not only better for employees, it’s also good for business health.
All in all, produced correctly, training videos are a fantastic way to train staff.
Training videos are a highly effective and quick way to instantly communicate your important training messages to your staff, customers and contractors.
But like everything in life – you get what you pay for. Poorly produced training videos can be a waste of time and resources. And if you’re using them for customers, be really careful you’re not damaging your brand and more importantly, your credibility.
Here are five common mistakes. There are lots, lots more, but here are the main ones.
1. Not using a tripod – This would have to be one of the simplest things to do, but remarkably one of the sure signs of an amateur video is hand-held wobbly vision. You’d swear that the camera operator was an old, recovering alcoholic. The main problem with this is that as a viewer you get really distracted by the wobbles (and you do ask yourself, is that dude okay?, are they about to fall over?) rather than listening to the person talking to camera or the important procedure. This also extends to lots of moving vision when a person is talking. Your eyes follow the path of the camera and our brain believes that the new camera move is leading to important information.
One frustrating example is in this video about Hepatitis in which a Hepatitis C sufferer talks about his ordeal. Rather, than give this person the respect he deserves, the camera moves about so much that you just know that the camera operator is bored with the information. The camera focuses on his ear (and you think, did this disease give him ear problems?), then the top of his head. Even more confusingly while he’s talking, vision is shown with him giving a hopeful smile. This video fails because the camera work is so erratic that you’re too busy following what’s going on to have any brain width left to listen to the poor interviewee.
2. Not using cut aways properly – One of the reasons why video is so amazing at quickly getting information across is because it uses both audio and visual information (which is like a dual-encoding process in the brain). To make this work, you need to complement the audio information with relevant visuals. If you don’t do this, people will give up on listening because it’s too hard to work out on what’s going on or even if they do stick with it, they will remember very little.
An example that frustrated me enormously was a testimonial style video made for Google Apps called “Flight Centre has gone Google”. You’d think Google would have the best marketing and training videos around, because after all they own YouTube. But sadly, this video was so bad I didn’t dare show it to my business partner as to why we needed the services. He would have spat the dummy at this clumsy attempt at communication.
This video fails on quite a number of levels:
They’ve tried to make it exciting. Jarring music is used that is too loud and makes it hard to hear what they’re saying.
Quick, wobbly cuts make it difficult to focus on what people are talking about. Important points are quickly cut to the next point making it hard for the brain to absorb what has been said and the importance of it.
Really poor choices of cut aways are used. My favourite is the staff member having a peak at whether he’s being filmed. He’s being matched to the content of a “global solution” (he should have been matched to “Staff always like to know what you’re doing”). Also, the one where the Account Manager is talking about servers and the camera vision focuses on a hard hat in the office. Priceless! (By the way, we’re using this video internally to show our new recruits how to not create a video).
Zappos is another well know company that seems to have missed the point of cut aways. This amazing company (see my book review Delivering Happiness), has some of the worst examples of training and marketing videos around. Sadly, they think they’re really great because they have an in-house team who went to film school. If only film school taught them how to communicate to a business audience.
Zappos are renowned for their core values. In this video, staff members name the core values, but very few of them are explained. It also features lots of nauseatingly wobbly vision, distracting music and audio. However, they do use cut aways well towards the end. It just needed to be consistent. This is one of those videos you don’t really want your customers to see. Even if you think it shows you as being quirky. Zappos just appear disorganised, unable to focus and having a really lazy and careless attitude to their core values (which isn’t true, but that’s the message the video makes).
3. Distracting Backgrounds and Audio – A well made video gets people understanding and listening to what you’re talking about. As mentioned before, what makes video so powerful is the use of both audio and visual together. Get one wrong and you might as well not bother. People’s eyes will go to what’s moving. So if someone walks past the back of the set where someone is being interviewed. Guess what everyone looks at? And if that person manages to look at the camera in an interesting way? Ditto.
It’s also the same with audio. Make sure the person talking to camera is the only one talking. Don’t have other people having a conversation in the back of the room (hello, Zappos!)
And always remove inappropriate items in the background. Discard the empty bottle sitting on the mantlepiece (yep, Zappos again), the naked pictures on someone’s desk and anything that will distract from your message. Remember the uproar when the Macquarie bank staff member looked at Miranda Kerr pictures during the live piece to camera?
4. Saying too much – This is a big issue and it’s also one in professionally made videos. Work out your key messages beforehand and stick to them. Avoid the CEO meandering and repeating information. Make it short and insightful. One of the worst company training videos that I was made to watch by a client was 30 minutes. We would have been able to do it in 10 minutes. And because they hadn’t filmed enough vision, they repeated vision from other sections to fill it up. And the camera operator narrated it while he walked around. Appalling! I still have nightmares about that one.
5. Wasting time filming and editing – Creating a video takes time. A lot of time.
First, there’s writing the script, filming, directing, organising the voiceover (please use a professional, not Sam in accounts because he acted in a school play when he was 15. And don’t even consider narrating while you’re filming), editing and exporting to the final format. Each of theses stage is time consuming and difficult to get right for the novice (even if they did make a photo slideshow of their kid’s dance concert in 2008).
What do you want staff doing? Working on projects that will boost your bottom line or stuffing around trying to work out how to press record on a video camera?
So if you are making a training video for your company, write a script that is succinct, film using a tripod (or better yet, get a professional camera operator), ensure no distracting objects or people are in your shots, get a professional voice record and match your visual and audio content.
And if you’re using a professional, just make sure they don’t convince you to use hand-held wobbly vision. It’s just a sign that the production house finds your content boring and they want to spice it up.
Barbara Fredrickson is a social psychologist who has conducted extensive research into emotions and positive psychology.
In the book, 
Many safety professionals believe they need to reward staff to get them to behave safely.
In a recent online discussion with safety professionals from around the world, we discussed what types of visuals they use during their safety presentation training.
Training videos