How to make your Health and Safety Communications more engaging

Hi I’m Lotty from Shot Blast Media and in this video we’re going to be discussing five top tips for producing better, more effective and engaging health and safety communications. 

So one of the most important things when producing any communication is to make it relevant and specific towards your target market so with a health and safety video for example you may have different types of audience groups. Take an induction video. So there are different people that may come and visit the site so you’ve got your staff, contractors, visitors and any may be potentially some specialist services so break down your content and that induction video into multiple edits so it’s going to be more tailored towards the different types of audience. Your contractors for example might be interested in working at height procedures or dealing with confined spaces – or is that sort of information less relevant to someone visiting the site that maybe just needs to understand where the main muster point is. So make it relevant, make it key and topical towards your target market.

One of the other things that you can do with your content is break this down into more simplified pieces of information. So this is all about bite-sized topics so say if you had a bigger theme like driving safety, you could break it down into the specific rules on site around driving safety and those could be individual videos but also part of a master version as well. This just means that if the information is broken down into smaller bite-sized pieces of information then people are more likely to retain it. 

One of the big challenges when producing health and safety video content is how can you make it creative? So what you’ve got to do is think outside the box – how can you create more fun in this piece? How can you create more personality? People relate to people at the end of the day so this is the key thing to get engagement. Have some personality in there! We’ve all seen those really dull corporate health and safety videos and after the first few minutes people just switch off so think about trying to incorporate different things, you could use a character for example or could you deliver some of the health and safety content through a cartoon style animation. This is going to make it a bit more fun and engaging to watch.

Another key thing to think about when producing health and safety communications is accessibility. Where are these people going to find the information? Where is it going to be available to watch, to read, to interact with? It sounds very very simple but often people don’t think about this and the more places where the information is relevant and it’s easy to access the more people, staff, visitors, contractors and anyone who needs to access the information can, so this is all about thinking to do with all the existing resources that you have. Do you have some external resources that you can use like social media that bring awareness of a certain campaign? Are there internal communication systems that you have such as a company portal where this information can be posted? It’s all about thinking again outside the box and thinking about as many different ways in which this information can be delivered and that will ensure that people get the opportunity to see the information and therefore engage with it.

Ambassadors are key for driving health and safety communications. Now obviously if it’s a high level message then this is often best coming from the CEO, from the top person within the organization, so it filters down through the company but other people will then help drive that message all the way out to the operational site staff through to your office based staff. They’re the safety people, they’re the champions within the company that really drive the message home so the use of ambassadors to drive any kind of new health and safety communication when you want to establish it and get engagement is key.

Thanks for checking out our vlog, I hope you’ve enjoyed it! If there’s any other health and safety communication based material you’d like us to cover then please get in touch.