Best Practices for International Safety Days
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work on one of the most interesting—and challenging—safety training projects of my career.
A large international brewery asked me to develop 27 different safety training activities for its annual Safety Day. The activities would be used at numerous locations in different countries, often translated into different languages and facilitated by people I would never meet.
Creating one engaging safety activity is relatively straightforward. Creating 27 activities that can be packaged up, sent around the world, translated, facilitated locally, and still accomplish the intended learning objective is something else entirely.
The project taught me a lot about what makes a safety activity truly portable. Here are ten lessons I still use when designing training today.
1. Make It Facilitator-Independent
When you develop an activity that you will personally facilitate, it's easy to fill in the gaps. You know what you meant. You can clarify a confusing instruction, answer questions, or improvise when something doesn't work quite as planned.
You don't have that luxury when your activity is being facilitated thousands of miles away.
Assume the facilitator has never seen the activity before. Give them everything they need: setup instructions, a materials list, timing, step-by-step directions, answers or an answer key when appropriate, and questions for the debrief.
A good test is simple: Could I hand this activity to someone tomorrow and have them successfully run it without calling me?
2. Think About Translation From the Beginning
Translation shouldn't be something you think about after an activity has already been developed.
Idioms, clever wordplay, acronyms, slang, humor, and culturally specific references can all create problems when content moves from one language to another. One thing that always jumps out at me - even when I am attending other training sessions in the US - is the use of sports analogies. Sure - I know what it means to hit something out of the park, fumble, and have a hat trick - but we should never assume everyone does.
Even an activity title that sounds clever in English may make absolutely no sense once translated.
Write short sentences. Use familiar words. Avoid unnecessary jargon. And don't make the success of an activity depend upon a pun or clever turn of phrase that a translator will somehow have to recreate.
3. Design for Cultural Differences
Language isn't the only thing that changes when training crosses borders.
Think about the assumptions built into the activity itself.
Does it involve competition? Physical interaction? Humor? Role-playing? Speaking in front of a group? Images, gestures, situations, or references that might be interpreted differently elsewhere?
An activity doesn't need to eliminate every cultural difference. But it shouldn't depend heavily on one particular cultural context to work.
This is another reason to pilot activities with people who weren't involved in their development. Sometimes we don't recognize our own assumptions until someone else encounters them. Piloting, and getting feedback after, these types of activities is always a good idea.
4. Use Visuals Whenever Possible
Visuals can do a lot of the heavy lifting in international training.
Pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, sorting activities, matching exercises, sequencing cards, and other visual approaches can reduce the amount of written language participants need to process.
Consider the difference between reading several paragraphs describing the correct order for a task and physically arranging illustrated cards into the correct sequence.
The second approach may be easier to understand, more engaging and easier to translate.
Of course, visuals aren't automatically universal either. Images should still be reviewed for cultural appropriateness and clarity.
5. Keep Materials Ordinary and Accessible
This was one of those practical lessons that becomes much more important when an activity is being used around the world.
Don't design an activity around a specialized prop that may be readily available where you live but difficult or expensive to obtain somewhere else. For example, I've used skeletons (easily bought on sale after Halloween is celebrated in the US) in some activities but these may be much more difficult to get elsewhere.
Whenever possible, use things sites are likely to already have: paper, cards, markers, common workplace objects, or materials that can simply be printed locally.
And don't forget about the paper itself.
Not every country routinely uses the same paper size. A printable designed tightly around U.S. Letter paper may not reproduce properly on A4 or F4 paper.
Design printable materials with a generous safe area so important text, images, borders, and cutting guides aren't sitting at the edge of the page. Ideally, materials should still work when someone selects “Fit to Page” or “Scale to Fit.”
6. Build Flexibility Into the Activity
One location might have 10 participants. Another might have 100.
One facilitator might have 30 minutes. Another might discover that the schedule has slipped and now has only 10.
One activity might take place in a training room. Another might happen on a production floor.
Instead of designing for one perfect set of circumstances, build in options.
Tell facilitators how to shorten or extend the activity. Explain how to divide a large group into teams. Identify optional questions. Suggest alternatives when space or materials are limited.
You're not just designing an activity. You're designing something other people need to adapt successfully.
7. Don't Forget the Learning
Safety Days should be fun. In fact, I'm a big believer in making safety training more engaging which should be no surprise given the name of my company is SafetyFUNdanentals!
But fun isn't the learning objective.
Every activity should have a clear answer to the question: What should participants know, recognize, decide, or do differently as a result of this activity?
The debrief is particularly important.
Don't end an activity with, "That was fun! Next station!"
Ask a few carefully chosen questions that help participants connect what they just experienced to the decisions and behaviors required on the job.
That's often where the real learning occurs.
8. Pilot Before You Multiply
A slightly confusing instruction isn't necessarily a disaster when you're standing in the room facilitating the activity.
Multiply that confusing instruction across numerous locations, facilitators, languages, and countries, and suddenly you have a much bigger problem.
Test before you distribute.
And whenever possible, don't test only with the people who developed the activity. They're too familiar with it.
Give the materials to someone who hasn't seen them before and watch what happens.
Where do they hesitate? What do they interpret differently than you intended? What questions do they ask? What do they skip?
Every question they ask is potentially something another facilitator will wonder about later.
9. Create a Consistent Structure
When you're creating multiple activities, consistency becomes incredibly valuable.
Imagine receiving 27 activities and discovering that every one is organized differently.
Instead, establish a standard format. For example:
Purpose → Time → Materials → Setup → Instructions → Answers → Debrief
Once facilitators learn where to find information in the first activity, they know where to look in every other activity.
Consistency also makes the materials easier to review, translate, update, and reproduce.
10. Design for the Person Who Isn't in the Room
Perhaps the biggest lesson I took from this project was that designing training for yourself and designing training for others to deliver are two very different things. In the world of instructional design, and more so in gamification, there is a concept known as a "self hug." This refers to what happens when we design or build in an activity that we are ourselves would like without thinking about what the audience would really like or be comfortable with.
When you're not going to be in the room, you have to anticipate and simplify more.You also have to let go of the assumption that everyone has the same language, materials, cultural references, group size, physical space or even paper size that you do.
That's especially important for international Safety Days, but I think it's good advice for any safety training activity you want someone else to use.
Design it so the learning doesn't depend on you being there.
What would you add to the list? If you've coordinated a Safety Day across multiple locations or inherited an activity someone else created, what lesson did you learn the hard way? I'd love to hear about it!
Leave a comment
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Also in SafetyFUNdamentals Blog
EHS Curated Podcasts Update for July 2026
This update covers everything from lithium-ion battery risk, OSHA litigation, heat stress economics, proactive safety culture, and what it takes to run a company for 100 years in a high-hazard industry.
