One of the primary struggles for Health and Safety professionals and advocates is keeping employees informed and interested in new developments or updates to policies. Updating all of your locations and employees is a tricky proposition – you need to make your health and safety announcements click-worthy in order to ensure that you garner interest and drive awareness in your policy updates.
Here are some tips to help you make your updates more effective and gather critical field feedback.
Health and Safety is a two-way street
Health and Safety is not the most “popular” side of the operation. It is an aspect that in many cases is viewed as directional – needed but not wanted. The result can be a push of directives, new instructions, and checklists, giving assignments to teams in the form of a formal, official email. These are often sent with a “hope for the best,” fingers crossed mentality that the email might be just enough for compliance.
While sharing appropriate information with your teams is mandatory, it is critical to establish a feedback loop and have the tools and processes in place that allow you and empower your distributed teams and locations to feed information and issues back to the head office. Engaging them as part of the process ensures a greater probability of success.
Collecting field feedback and issues related to Health and Safety will allow you to not only foster a safer working environment but will also enable you to view and analyze trends in different locations and regions, and understand the types of concerns that need the most attention and when to expect them. Such data uncovers great operational savings, reduces insurance costs and increases labour retention. Transitioning the entire operation from being reactive to proactive is key. The new generation of employees expects to be heard, so giving them a handle on their health and safety at work can improve your organization’s morale.
Safety doesn’t mean boring. Take a page out of digital media and make your update click-worthy
Though your Health and Safety updates or initiatives are important, you must recognize that you’re competing with the rest of your organization for bandwidth in your employees’ minds. To be competitive, be creative about how you communicate with your employees. Take cues from social media and create an update that has an emotional impact on your employees to help drive home messages for maximum efficacy. Choose compelling images to dress up the message.
Use different mediums. Account for different ways of processing the information
Think of information consumption in your own personal life. More than likely, you get most of your information through blogs, images, and videos. Be creative about how to deliver your message. 56% of all mobile phone users claim to watch videos on Youtube at least once a day. Deliver your update in the written form that creates the body of your policy, while delivering the actionable insights via other mediums such as videos and blogs to ensure that your employees absorb the critical action items.
Create short clips that are memorable for employees to keep your policy in mind. Adopt social media-like tactics with multiple reminders over a short span to ensure that any employee who missed your update will be able to catch it at a later date.
Find a site sponsor to engage multi-location staff
Every good social media account has at least one influencer who will share posts and updates. You need the same thing. Find an onsite sponsor that will champion your cause. Having someone that you can entrust to deliver the message and target the people that your message is particularly relevant to can be a powerful way of implementing your policy.
Health and safety protocols are designed to keep people safe and aware, but the seriousness of the issue at hand doesn’t need to set the tone for the message. Creating a document that resonates with your audience will give you a better chance of adoption and ultimately keep your employees safe.
If you’re using Intelocate for your Healthy and Safety updates and have a great story to tell, let us know. We’d love to hear it!
