Making health and safety inductions fun and effective

Turning boring health and safety visitor inductions into a delightful digital experience for Balfour Beatty.

As part of their Zero Harm initiative, Balfour Beatty aimed to eliminate workplace health and safety incidents across construction sites and offices. To support this mission, they needed a way to deliver health and safety inductions to visitors in a self-service format.

Our challenge was to transform pages of dry health and safety information into an engaging, effective experience that visitors could complete independently upon arrival.

We began by observing visitor behaviour at Balfour Beatty’s London office. This field research revealed a number of useful insights: the average number of visitors at any given moment, how long they waited for their host, what they did whilst they waited and where they sat.

Armed with this knowledge, we knew we had to deliver an engaging experience that could be completed within two minutes. We’d need to deliver the induction to multiple people at the same time and we’d need to make it compelling enough to distract them from their phones.

With this in mind, we developed a gamified tablet app featuring a simplified 3D representation of the building. Visitors were tasked with identifying hazardous behaviours which revealed relevant health and safety information and allowed them to progress to the next level. The app was optimised to deliver the full induction experience in under two minutes, with attractor screens designed to catch attention quickly.