Poster Campaigns That Get Attention

By Josh Williams, Ph.D.

Create a poster campaign with small rewards to raise safety awareness in a fun, fresh way. 

Safety initiatives that include employee participation help develop a stronger safety culture and increase operational performance. Strive for more than just compliance – make safety personal, so that people are using their better judgement to make safe decisions instead of just following orders.

How do you make safety personal? One simple way is to use employees’ own words and images. Make posters! Giving employees the opportunity to create their own safety posters makes them more likely to care about the posters and the messages behind them. If you are an employee who came up with a poster yourself, or you know that one of your colleagues made it, you will likely be more receptive to the message compared to a generic poster. Plus, organizing fun activities for your teams fosters a team dynamic and sends the message that their input is appreciated. 

Real Life Example: The Safety Poster Campaign

At a bearing facility in Southwest Virginia, the safety manager was tasked with purchasing safety signs and banners for the organization. Rather than shop for posters, he chose to set up a competition for employees to design their own signs and pay the top three winners as voted on by their peers. Prizes were given out for first ($100), second ($50) and third place ($25).

Employees were given two hours in one of the main conference rooms with flip chart pages and markers to design their posters. They were allowed to make as many posters as they wanted to for the contest. In the end, the winning employee was a maintenance worker who drew Forrest Gump running down the road carrying a box of chocolates and wearing safety glasses and other PPE under the caption, “Safety IS as Safety DOES.” Completed posters were hung around the facility and were highly effective in getting employees’ attention.  

Call to Action

Getting employee input with proactive, behavioral incentives is a fun way to reinforce safety. Employee made posters are one way to do this.

At Propulo, we work with leaders to find new ways to promote safety culture improvement.