4 Types of Effective Safety Training Videos for Your Employees

Safety training videos are about so much more than checking a box to fulfill compliance. Many of these safety videos can truly save lives. OSHA reports that in the construction industry, the Fatal Four (falls, electrocutions, flying objects, and caught betweens), were responsible for over 60% of construction deaths in 2014. And that eliminating the Fatal Four would save 545 workers' lives in America every year. Creating training videos that effectively communicate the safety protocols for your company can help stop illness, prevent injury, and — yes — even save lives.

With that being said, there are several effective methods that you can use to successfully communicate your message to your audience. It's important to consider your options and determine what is best for your subject matter. Remember that you don't have to choose just one — you may be able to incorporate several different video types as a way to continually engage your audience and help solidify your message with your employees.

1. Add Humor to Exaggerate the Obvious

While safety is not an issue that you should mess around with, humor has the ability to make something that is otherwise just a necessary, mandatory task, and transform it into something that your workers can relate to and will be more likely to remember after they have finished watching. Research shows that laughter helps increase student engagement and enhance learner recall.

The video below shows quick examples of right way vs. wrong way training done in an exaggerated way to increase the humor level. Creating this type of video can really help educate new employees but also provide a fresh perspective for long-time employees who know firsthand the dangers that their job can face every day.

2. Create Interactivity to Engage Your Employees

Take advantage of tools that are available in the market today by creating an interactive training video. Interactive video players like Rapt Media, Viddler, and Vidzor allow you to take a simple video and create layers of interactions for your users to connect with. Make the viewer point out where they see the safety mistake or have them choose their own path of action and see the resulting consequences. Putting the viewer in a position to make decisions and, more importantly, mistakes allows them to understand the gravity of their negative actions.

Creating this interactive video will allow users to have safe experiences that emulate the real life safety hazards in a way that will help them recall and avoid the things that lead to safety hazards in real life.

3. Get Employee Involvement with Gamification

Gamification has been the hot topic in the training industry for a little while now, but integrating some gamification can really help your employees buy-in to the process of training in a new way. Gamification is simply taking some of the main elements of the gaming world and incorporating them into your training in a way that helps challenge users to partake and engage. Try creating a leaderboard for employees who have the best scores on the test questions after the videos, allow users to earn badges for successfully complete training modules or going a certain number of days/years without an accident or incident. Reward employees who have built up years worth of knowledge by creating different training levels that encourage them to keep learning.

4. Go Deep with Webinars

Have employees that are ready for the next step in safety training? Create webinars that go beyond simple compliance. Teach employees how to be safety leaders on the job, how to look out for other employees, and how to create job sites that are centered around safety first. Make use of interesting, industry experts that are engaging on camera. You can even use these webinars to help you understand who are the natural leaders in your company.

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