Like a quiz in school, a health & safety quiz is a great way for an EHS team to test what employees know about safety. But at a deeper level, it’s also a great way to get your workers thinking about essential safety issues.
The question, then, is what kinds of questions you should include in your health & safety quiz.
The questions depend in part on the nature of the quiz. Here are a few broad questions geared to help you start a broader conversation–in other words, questions you can use in safety training to have a teaching moment.
This question addresses a key piece of baseline knowledge for your workers. If they can identify the different types of hazards, they can more easily recognize them on the job.
There are several different types of hazards, and some lists include different primary categories. Common hazard categories include:
Certain hazard classification regulations and systems will differentiate specific hazards, such as the Canadian Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS), which identifies two hazard groups: physical and health hazards.
For a general quiz, simply ask your workers to name broad hazard categories, such as biological or physical hazards. You can then ask workers to go deeper by detailing examples of different hazard types, such as bloodborne pathogens under biological hazards.
Another good question to get your workers thinking about hazards is to ask the best way of dealing with hazards. You can present this as a multiple-choice question. For example, should you:
A) Remove it immediately
B) Leave it for others
C) Place a barrier around it
D) Display a notice or warning sign
The correct answer is A, but it’s a good way to start a conversation with workers about hazards that cannot be removed immediately and how to deal with them.
Moving away from general hazards to specific workplace dangers, the difference between “working alone” and “working in isolation” sounds like semantics to most workers but is actually a critical difference in regulatory language. A worker working in isolation may not necessarily be working alone, and someone working alone may not necessarily be working in isolation.
“Working alone” is when an employee:
A) is the only worker for that employer in the workplace at any time
B) is not directly supervised by their employer or someone designated as their supervisor
On the other hand, “working in isolation” specifically refers to situations where help may not be readily available in the event of injury or an emergency. For example, a worker may be working in isolation if they are out of view of fellow employees or in an area not readily accessible to other workers, even though they are not technically working alone.
It’s a subtle distinction requiring different safety precautions, and your workers need to understand the difference. That makes your health & safety quiz the perfect place to kick off a dialogue.
These questions only scratch the surface of everything you could cover in a health & safety quiz. But then, that’s part of the point: a health & safety quiz isn’t an end-all-be-all, but rather a starting point for deeper training.
We know that safety training is one of the most important duties of an EHS team. That’s why we built software to help you take your safety training a little deeper. If you’re ready to deliver training that teaches and protects your employees, get in touch to see how our software can strengthen your safety culture.