Three Rules for a Great Multimedia Presentation

I wanted to find a good HSE presentation online and was disappointed. The publicly available HSE presentations are visually off-putting and eliminate any chance of falling in love with the subject. Bulky text information, weighed down by stock images of "dancing stick figures." Such a presentation shows the presenter's attitude toward health and safety.

Main mistakes:

👎 Lack of understanding of the target audience — who the information in the presentation is for. This leads to a complete mismatch between the selected visuals and the text.

Judge for yourself: the same recommendation regarding medical examinations will sound different for different audiences:

For employees - check your physical condition at your annual medical exam. If you feel unwell before starting work or during the process, immediately inform your supervisor (foreman, manager).

For managers - inquire about the physical condition and well-being of employees before they start work. It is forbidden to allow an employee to perform high-risk work if they have contraindications or feel unwell. This could result in an injury.

👎 Lack of presentation structure or a storytelling line — where the speaker is leading the audience and through which stages.

Many speakers (instructors or HSE specialists) take the path of giving the audience terminology. Because of this, presentation slides are overloaded with text that does nothing to help the audience protect themselves or others from injuries and occupational diseases. Actions or facts formulated in slide titles direct the audience's attention to specifics with practical value. This establishes the story line (storytelling).

👎 Lack of carefully selected facts highlighting the issue. These could be indisputable figures and photographs. However, as a rule, these are rare in HSE presentations. Only text, lots of text, taken from the Labor Code of the Russian Federation.

This is the most painful topic, in my opinion. Numbers only matter when they are closely related to those for whom the presentation was made. Global or national injury statistics are far less impactful than your own. To achieve this, you shouldn't be lazy about collecting data and, above all, determining the format for its collection and processing for use in analyzing real cases.

It is important to undergo training in data handling — at a minimum in Excel, and at most, try creating a dashboard, for example, in DataLens (though Excel works too).

Unfortunately, I observe a significant gap in the ability to work with data in Excel. Failing to see the difference between the values "30" and "30." leads either to incorrect data that absolutely cannot be used or to additional work for the creator of the analytical report, even a small one.

Three rules for a good presentation:

1. Identify the target audience you are creating the presentation for.
2. Write the titles first as a draft and then as a final version to form the structure of the presentation. The title should make it clear what the topic is. Compare: “Analysis of the HSE Situation” and “Top 5 HSE Violations This Year,” or “Occupational Accidents” and “10 Accidents Occurred in Production Over the Last 3 Years.” The less vagueness in the text, the clearer the specific information you want to convey to the listeners (readers).
3. Select photos that illustrate the meaning of the text content on the slide, or use charts and figures. There shouldn't be too many figures or charts, as they are difficult to process, especially for unprepared audiences. All long, complex sentences should be shortened to a few words, leaving only the core essence. Other formats — articles, posts, notes, and ultimately books — were invented for long texts.