Workplace Safety Blog: It’s happened to the best of us. You’re standing in front of a room of people, tasked with the job of delivering a safety briefing. You’ve put on your best suit, practiced your presentation and double-checked your data. Yet as you look out at your audience, you are confronted by a sea of bored faces, shuffling their chairs, itching to leave. You don’t get it. After all, the things you’re saying are vitally important – possibly life saving! Yet for whatever reason, the message just isn’t getting through…
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While I was reading this article, two different examples of "safety briefings" came to mind- one good and one bad. Let's start with the good example. Last year, during 30 Hour OSHA class, Jim, our instructor, utilized many of the tips discussed in this article. Jim always brought in real life examples, often examples that occurred here at CMU. This technique really drew the attention of the class. While it may seem like many of the safety precautions being discussed are for events that would never happen, Jim's real life examples truly showed us that they can happen to anyone, and they will! Jim also brought an appropriate sense of humor into the classroom. Yes, safety is nothing to laugh about, but bringing in an appropriate amount of humor definitely captures your audience when discussing dull topics.
Now we will turn to the poor example of a "safety briefing," which is one that many people experience multiple times in their lives: the safety speech on an airplane. If you think about it, the safety speech on an airplane is vital, and very few people aboard airplanes pay close attention. While it may be extremely unlikely that you will ever need to know the safety precautions and practices while on an airplane, you never know. If you evaluate the airplane safety speech in the context of this article, airlines aren't doing a very good job of delivering this vital information. Perhaps airlines should consider presenting potentially lifesaving information in a more captivating way.
I'm really happy with how this article went about explaining how to spice up safety lectures. Comedy helps us pay attention. If it isn't scientifically proven, it's pretty darn close. This is not saying make a joke about the seriously information you're presenting, but make us remember the concept you're teaching. For me, I don't respond well to hearing about horrific accidents. I get lost in picturing the casualty rather than focusing on how to prevent it. To be honest, when explaining safety procedures, I would rather someone walk me through every little step in layman's terms than talking quickly in language I don't understand. In informal teaching, such as on crew, we get a quick version of the safety lecture for one tool or the other. Of course, it's silly to go through every individual thing, but I'd rather be over-informed than under-informed.
I spent 8 weeks this summer having to give the Safety Orientation to between 100 and 200 people and it was one of the hardest times I've ever had because while the information I was walking everyone through was important I could just see the lack of interest in my audiences. I tried very hard and different techniques through the summer at finding ways to get this information across without putting everyone asleep. I tried almost all of the different pieces of advice that this article suggest and they work a little bit but it's a difficult struggle and one that the people in charge of safety have to deal with. Like Jess was saying, Jim was very good during 30 hour OSHA about keeping us engaged, but he also had to deal with having class at 8 in the morning which makes everything difficult. I also was able to watch Monona Rossol give her HazCom talk, and I alternated between watching her and watching the audience. One of my favorite exchanges during her talk went like this:
Monona: Does someone want to wake this child up? (referring to an intern falling asleep)
Intern: I'm listening.
Monona: Well this is your only chance to listen to the crazy lady speak so I'd take advantage of it.
She was great at giving the information in ways that people could understand but found ways to keep people invested. But then again she does this talk over and over so has the opportunity to really refine it and make it work.
But unless the people you are talking to care about the information it's not going to sink in.
For how important safety is, presenting the information in an interesting enough way to keep people listening is difficult. I'm all about safety but even I find sitting through or watching a safety presentation to be incredibly boring. It's even worse with safety films than in-person presentations. It's really hard to take something that is still played off a VHS seriously. The worst example I've seen of this was when I went skydiving. We had to watch a safety video given by a guy with a huge beard in a wood paneled office that was probably filmed in the late 80s or early 90s and it was just so laughably terrible. The scary thing is that I was about to jump out of a plane and was laughing at the guy giving me legitimate safety information. The tips in this article are good but what I would be worried about is undercutting the important information by trying to make the presentation more interesting.
This article reminded me of when I went to space camp when I was younger. We had a series of briefings every day. The ones I still remember are the ones that injected humor and a few of the other suggestions in this article. I think that safety briefings as dull as they can be, can also be thought of like a story telling experience. What makes a story memorable for an audience? Those same techniques are basically what this article is talking about. Yeah, its important to convey the seriousness of safety to the group, but if they dont remember anything, thats just as useless.
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