Making your Health and Safety Communications Engaging
Health and Safety Communications may sound dull on paper, but they don’t have to be. You can create engaging and fun communications for your audience. In this video course Lotty will tell you how, going through different types of content and various techniques to make them stand out.
Health and Safety communications, on paper, sound a bit drole. But they don’t have to be, and you only have to make them engaging for your content to reach your audience and engage them in your messages. But how exactly can you make this content appealing and engaging? Here’s exactly how.
One of the most important things when producing any type of content is to make it relevant and specific towards your target audience. With a health and safety video for example you may have different types of audience groups. Take an induction video. There are different people that may come and visit the site – you’ve got your staff, contractors, visitors and some of them might also provide some specialist services. Break down your content into multiple edits targeted for each audience group. This way 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 – this type of content isn’t applicable to a visitor who might need to know where the site muster points are and what to do in the event of an emergency.
One of the other things that you can do with your content is break this down into more simplified pieces of information. This is all about bite-sized topics. If you were producing a safety topic on driving safety for example you may have some parts that are relevant to a manufacturing site but not as an office site. Breaking the topic down into sections and then testing people’s knowledge is a good way for people to remember small but important pieces of information.
One of the big challenges when producing health and safety video content is how can you make it creative? People relate to people 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. The best thing about video is that the platform is very expansive, meaning you can delve into different formats of video. Animation is a great option for these types of videos. It makes the video a whole lot more colourful and exciting, and with animation the possibilities are endless. 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 way could be to make the content interactive. Having a video that has some element of interactivity built into it will help people connect. Multiple choice questions for example can check peoples understanding before they progress onto the next section of video. This also helps to break up the content by giving the person in the audience a task.
Another key thing to think about when producing health and safety communications is accessibility. Where is your audience going to find the information? Where is it going to be available to watch, to read, to interact with? It sounds very simple but often people don’t think about this. 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 outside the box again and thinking about as many different ways in which this information can be delivered, which will ensure that people get the opportunity to see the information and therefore engage with it.
Whilst is it opportune to use visual methods in your video, a voiceover can really help capture the attention of your staff. Picking the most suitable voice that helps to represent your company is a must. This is especially key if those watching your video are new employees, as it will give them more of a sense of what your company is about. Whether it’s a soft voice, or a gruff but clear voice, picking the right one that is suited can really grab your audience in different ways. Of course, it beats reading the information off of a piece of paper when you have someone speaking to you – it almost feels like a conversation. With that in mind, multi language versions of your video can be extremely useful if you need the information in different languages.It’s inexpensive once you’ve produced the video to put it into another language, editing to change text or to place a new voiceover in is not a hard job. It makes a massive impact if needed.
