When it comes to any highly effective safety communication, it’s important that you:

• Grab people’s attention –
• Help workers easily understand what they need to do
• Encourage employees to remember important information
• Change behaviour, so that people work safely.
• Ensure that everyone consistently understands the information with no confusion.

After many years of helping companies with their safety communication, what I have discovered is that there are eight essential elements that need to be included for best results. These elements combine both left brain and right brain information that help readers better process and recall your information. Understanding these elements also helps you write really easy to understand safety communication that works towards positively changing safety behaviours. It’s called this the SELLSAFE formula that includes:

Simple Emotion Look Lasting

Story Authority Focus Energy

The eight important elements are:

1. Simple messages – Humans can only learn and remember so much information at once. The more information you give people, the more they can get paralysed by it. Prioritising information by providing a clear message, rescues people from having to work out what to do next.

2. Emotion – Emotionally charged events burn the experience onto our brain. Our brains have evolved to learn from emotional events so that we don’t put ourselves in danger.

3. Look and Feel – Make sure that when promoting your safety message, in a variety of mediums, that you use the same colours, font style, language, message and design. This is because it creates a mental model for readers and enhances their understanding of the topic. It’s also got to look good (if it looks amateurish, people will ignore it)

4. Lasting – Create long-lasting messages by repeating your message in multiple places, multiple times. It’s important that you repeat your message so that people see it at least 4-7 times. After all, the more people see a message, the more they believe it.

5. Stories – Our right brain prefers stories. We remember stories better than if we were just told facts. They provide an emotional connection to information.

6. Authority – One way humans determine what is correct is to look at what other people are doing. In particular, we view behaviour as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

7. Focus – One of the reasons why you see so much bad safety communication is because the majority of communication tries to be all things to all people. All safety communication requires a clear goal or objective that focuses on one topic.

8. Energy (Action) – In safety communication, it’s all about getting people to think about the safety issue and make changes to their behaviour. Always end your safety communication with the action you require.

By incorporating all of these elements, you will create really authentic safety communication that is easy to understand.

Find out about them in more detail, by ordering your copy of “Transform Your Safety Communication” today.