How to Develop a Workplace Safety Messages Campaign (Part 2)

Marie-Claire Ross — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:30:03 +0000

As mentioned in ” How to Develop a Workplace Safety Messages Campaign” Part 1, marketing is the key to getting your safety messages heard and understood.

But how does the ordinary safety professional instigate a marketing campaign to educate staff about safety initiatives?

Let’s do some Marketing 101 lessons, to look at the steps you need to undertake to deliver your marketing (oops, safety) strategy.

Who is your audience? You need to work out who your target audience is and their demographics. Are they mainly males 35 – 55 years? Or a combination of both males and females, but aged 15 – 25 years? By working out exactly who your audience is, you can better work out the types of communication they are more likely to watch, read and hear.
What are your objectives? What are you trying to achieve? How can you measure the success of the communication program? What data can you measure both before and after the launch of the new safety campaign?
What is your message? What is it that you want to say? If it is to raise awareness about safe forklift driving, why do you need to let people know about this. Ensure that you let people know what the safety initiative is and why it is important. How can you ensure all departments have the same consistent message?
What communication methods can you use? Ideally, use multiple types of communication and deliver it multiple times. Put together a strategy as to how you can communicate the same safety messages daily, weekly or monthly.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Gypsum Board Manufacturers of Australasia (GBMA) needed a manual handling training program to train 3,000 workers from five different companies on how to handle plasterboard safely. In the plasterboard industry, manual handling injuries are the most common of injuries.

The training program was treated as a marketing exercise. An iconic plasterboard man was designed who featured on all of the communication. A slogan was also created “Move it – The GBMA Way”. Both the iconic man and the slogan were a way of reminding workers on a daily basis about the training they had received. Training centred around a 20 minute training video that also included medical animations to show how the back works. A trainer’s manual, PowerPoint Slides and employee handbook were used for training. The employee handbook was A6 size to encourage workers to keep in pockets or lockers for easy reference. Posters were also designed with the same theme as a daily reminder.

“The training material components were key in engaging roles such as Team Leaders to deliver the training to their teams effectively. One of the keys to getting engagement with the safety messages on a daily basis has been the handbooks and posters to prompt training information.”. Gerard Crosswell, GIB NZ

Effective safety communication needs to be very specific to your organisation and tailored to your workplace demographics and culture.

It must integrate with a company’s day to day activities and be of value to the workers watching it. Slick communication materials are not the answer.

Care needs to be taken so that communication materials are credible and easy to understand.

But more importantly, any safety communication needs to provide daily reminders to staff while they work, for the best results.

How can you best communicate your new safety initiatives?

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Why do men feel the urge to insert sexual terms into workplace training materials?

Marie-Claire Ross — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:09:06 +0000

Back in the early 90′s, there used to be an Australian comedy series called “Fast Forward”, that featured a character called, Calvin Cunnington (played by Michael Veitch), who would burst into laughter at any sexual innuendos mentioned in the workplace, subsequently driving his colleagues mad.

As a training video producer, specializing in safety and induction videos, as well as marketing videos in the industrial arena, I come across training materials that are pretty dry. My job is to transform the training materials into training video scripts that are interesting and will improve message retention and comprehension.

Yet weirdly, I feel a bit like Calvin when I read training materials and find all sorts of sexual terms lurking behind quite mundane and technical text.

My favourite one is slab penetration. Any shape and size of penetration can be made through decking. If size of penetration is greater than one rib…..

I couldn’t work out what it all meant and was very surprised to discover that slab penetration is all about cutting. Who knew that cutting a piece of metal is really all about penetrating and that even the size is so important?

The next one is “insert the fuel nozzle into the receptacle“. Okay, that’s probably harmless and the more I think about it, it would be pretty hard not to write that in a suggestive tone!

But time and time again, I come across very technical training materials that seem to use a lot of references to penetration, erections, vibrator compaction (ouch!) and receptacles. And many times, I’ve felt that the words are just said too many times or could be substituted for something else.

It reminds me of my biology notes at school. I found it quite funny to write orgasm, instead of organism in my personal biology notes. My mother read them and was quite disturbed that I had got those words so wrong. But that was just a teenager deliberately exchanging words for a bit of fun.

What I can’t work out is whether men are deliberately slipping in sexual terms because they are finding the material just a tad boring and they want to spice things up a bit. Or whether it’s all a bit subconscious.

One thing for sure is that while inserting sexual terms into training might be a bit of fun for the writer, it certainly doesn’t help the learner. Once I stumble on sexual innuendos in a very non-sexy topic, it is fairly distracting. Particularly, when I can’t understand how in the world cutting can be replaced by penetration. Or maybe it’s just me (or just a girl thing)? Maybe men are fine with all of these phallic phrases and don’t even notice them.

But as for staff training, how do employees go with reading these training materials? Are there Calvin-esque type sniggers occurring during induction training in workplaces across the country?

What I want to know is has anyone else experienced sexual terms being inserted into training materials (or even marketing materials) that just seemed a little bit inappropriate?

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The Workplace Improver Blog » corporate videos

How to Develop a Workplace Safety Messages Campaign (Part 2)

Why do men feel the urge to insert sexual terms into workplace training materials?