Make training fun

It can be true that some employee training sessions revolve around topics that aren’t necessarily especially interesting. Take the example of health and safety briefings. While these are absolutely essential for any business, they can often come across as dull or unnecessary.

You can counteract this by making the sessions as fun as possible. A training session on the driest of topics can be lifted by injecting humour and allowing employees to relax as they learn. One of the best ways you can do this is by using charismatic and engaging trainers. The right presenter who can have fun will really improve the amount that staff members can get from a session.

Another popular way to keep staff interested is through gamification. Gamification works by introducing aspects of games to motivate people to achieve certain goals. For example, when running a sales training event you can set up a league table for sales. This could then lead to prizes being awarded for the best performance.

Make use of audience response systems

An audience response system (ARS) allows you to receive immediate feedback from individual handheld devices. This has a huge variety of uses in training sessions as it allows you to engage individuals through the technology.

One use is in testing and quizzes to ensure that everyone in the session is paying attention and understand the material they are being introduced to. Instead of having paper tests that then have to be assessed and marked, ARSs allow for instantaneous assessment. Which can then be displayed anonymously.

Live Q&A sessions help to keep employees interested in the subject matter instead of expecting employees to sit and listen for the duration of the training.

Encourage interactivity

It’s not actually particularly useful for employees to listen to a lengthy lecture filled with stats. In fact, if you are trying to get a message across it’s a much better idea to break up the training sessions with opportunities for interactivity. This can come both through Q&A with the tutor and time for peer-to-peer discussions.

People often learn best by talking things through with their colleagues. It gives them the chance to share their own stories and experiences which can often be far more effective than examples given by trainers. You might find that some members of staff are performing a task in a different way to others. When alternative methods are shared it can ultimately lead to an improved way of working.

However in some instances, simply creating these procedures and tutorials for employees to follow is not enough when it comes to ensuring the safety of everyone on site. There may be liabilities that you have not planned for, or employees may go about certain procedures in a way that causes a risk you may not have predicted. The only real way to find and eliminate these risks is through regular meetings and risk assessment workshops with your employees. At CLiKAPAD, we will show how an Audience Response System can be put to good use when covering risk assessment workshops.

Quick Way of Collecting Data

For both risk assessment workshops and training purposes, an Audience Response System provides a means of quickly collecting data and configuring into a usable graph almost instantly. When looking at risks, you can quickly find out what your team think about the risk in question, allowing them to help construct a risk map using CLiKAPAD handheld clicker systems.

For trainees, highlighting the potential risks is also made easier with an Audience Response System, as you can easily collect data on what they might do to help prevent accident or injury. In collecting data in useful graphs, you can pull together all the graphs to create a risk assessment report at the end of each session.

It Can Determine the Best Solution to Any Given Problem

One of the best way to determine a solution to a problem is by posing that problem as a question to a group of professionals. As experienced employees, your team should be able to work together to find out the best solution to any potential risks and answer accordingly.

Where there is some doubt, the majority answer can be put into practice in a trial run.

If the risk is subsequently reduced, you have a more secure health and safety system than before, simply by using data collected from an Audience Response System.

Additional Comments Allow Further Discussion

Risk assessment meetings are not simply ways of checking whether or not the health and safety procedures are still in date, or whether any new risks have cropped up since the last assessment. It is also a means of communication between your employees to see if there is any way you can make the procedures easier and more effective for them.

Meetings such as these also help you to assess potential risks you may not have previously considered when creating the safety procedures. Theoretical procedures will only work to an extent whereas, in practice, your employees may have figured out a better way of preparing for certain safety procedures. In order to save time and in order to provide better training examples for future employees, it is important that this useful information is brought to light and integrated into the safety manuals and procedures. This way, you streamline your health and safety processes every time you have a risk assessment meeting.