Improve safety engagement with help from user experience experts

As safety professionals, we always look to engage as much as possible to influence others into making the safest choice.

Sometimes to improve, we have to look elsewhere for inspiration. Speaking with user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) professionals, they can teach us more about engaging our audience.

Here are 10 ways to learn from experts whose job it is to make things user friendly for customers.

Know your users

What really makes your audience tick? We need to know what their true drivers are. We accept that some find safety dull or look to cut corners, so compliance is hard. Look for that new angle to engage people. Recently, a connection was focussing on a promotion and took a greater interest in safety when they learnt the importance their clients placed on safety.  

Define user interaction 

How is your workforce using safety documents and processes? Do they have a particular sticking point in the process? Or not able to complete a step due to something outside of laziness? How people interact with Health & Safety is crucial to find the barriers that you need to remove. Have them involved in the improvement process for greater engagement.

Set expectations

Are you always upfront with people? Plenty of business directors promise to look into better PPE for example, only to turn around and reject it after seeing the price. If it’s never going to be possible, don’t dangle the carrot. Focus on easy wins first; look at what’s in your control as you can manage those expectations. 

Anticipate mistakes

Be truly critical of safety. What could really go wrong if not followed? A good lesson early in my career was not knowing staff didn’t always have internet connectivity. It meant that documents were completed after the job finished, rather than before, which defeated the object. Testing new ideas with the workforce is so important; don’t assume it’s fail safe already. 

Give feedback fast

No one likes to hang around for feedback. And they certainly don’t like hearing it from a third party! If something is wrong, do you look to correct it quickly? We accept as safety professionals that we have to be comfortable with conflict. Remember feedback doesn’t have to be negative; a simple compliment to someone doing the right thing goes a long way, and encourages repeated behaviours. If others see your more collaborative approach, you build better behaviours quicker.

Think about place and size 

Solutions are relative to context. When you engage others in safety, are your ideas a right fit for the working environment and size of the workforce? To make any safety improvement easier for you, look to ensure it can be scaled up or down to suit the whole organisation. Scalable solutions can be used elsewhere to support your career so don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t need to.

Don’t ignore standards

We all look to legal compliance but also strive towards best practice. Is there existing best practices that your company uses that you can relate safety engagement to? Within design for example, some safety teams look to revise safety documents around the RIBA plan of work that the industry already uses. What industry standards can you utilise?

Easy to learn

If it’s simple to follow, people shall do so. But we need to go above this and also make sure engagement is easy to learn. This is why so many acronyms have been invented in the past, such as the HSE’s SLAM or SUSA for having conversations about safety behaviours. You must think about being memorable so people retain the knowledge to engage.

Decisions made easy

Studies have proven that giving too many options results in ‘decision freeze’. So if we are asking someone to make a decision in safety, make it easy. People will also be more engaged where their decision is based on their own competence. For the quickest win, look to make the safer choice the easiest one.

Listen to the data

What can you learn about engagement within your safety data? Digging through your incident stats may show a pattern in human error (we all remember our studies confirming ‘that up to 80% of accidents may be attributed to people”). But what are people telling you on site? Remember, data can be qualitative as well as quantitative. Listen to what they have to say and engage in the conversation. 

Conclusion

There are shared tips between those designing apps, websites and other digital products to those engaging workforces with safety on site. It looks like safety and tech are more similar than we once thought. It is positive to see that working with others and communication are key components within the IOSH competency framework that we must look to improve.

So how many of these do you currently use? And which one are you going to focus on as a new CPD exercise?

Who are HandsHQ?

Since 2013, HandsHQ safety software gives the solution to your risk assessment and method statement (RAMS) frustrations. 1,500+ clients have signed up to help us create a system that is quick and easy, keeping your employees, contractors and clients safe. Get in touch to see the benefits.