Yesterday’s Advisor emphasized how important preparation is to conducting super safety training sessions. Today we discuss techniques for making training sessions more relevant and memorable.
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To liven up that safety meeting, remember this refrain: Personalize, relate, repeat, rephrase, and for goodness sakes, be enthusiastic!
Think of the training session as an important meal. Like a memorable meal, its presentation must be as appealing as its taste. A successful session will have both “sizzle and steak”—style and content—with lots of participation, give-and-take questions, examples, opinions, and enthusiasm from both the trainer and trainees.
To reach that goal:
- Personalize the meeting. Few things are as powerful in gaining trainee attention as hearing names they know, and especially their own. “If Sam here locked and tagged out the compressor and Gina took off the tag …” will get a lot more attention and engagement than “Be sure to lock and tag out.”
- Relate new information or skills to the trainees’ own jobs. Here’s where that walk-through of the trainees’ work area mentioned yesterday pays off. You won’t be talking about some abstract machine or procedure when you describe how to operate more safely. You’ll be talking about “When you load the XYZ-300 lathe” or “ABC350 paper shredder.”
- Get trainees involved. “Sandy, come on down!” Why do magicians always call on someone from the audience to help with their tricks? Because the audience then transfers their emotional involvement into that person, who now becomes a surrogate, acting in their place. Use this tactic by having trainees demonstrate or role-play situations you discuss.
- Rephrase and summarize. All trainees are individuals in how they learn. Some catch on quickly, others take longer. Some get it by hearing about it, others need to see visuals. The attention of some will be caught by humor and others by realistic scenarios. The key to successful training is to constantly repeat the key information at intervals as you move through the session and to repackage it as you do. It also helps to lay out a map for learning. As the old adage goes, “First, tell them what you’re going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them.” To which we would add, “Ask them to tell you back what you said.”
- Be enthusiastic! Don’t be shy about using your personality in projecting your message, with eye contact, gestures, and voice modulation. Everyone learns better from someone who seems to care.
- Bring a guest. An occasional guest speaker adds spice to the sizzle and the steak. Trade associations, equipment suppliers, and safety groups often offer speakers. But vet your expert’s credentials before handing over the laser pointer, as your organization may be held liable for any incident generated by misinformation.