Gamification in Supervisor Safety Training: Coaching the People Who Have to Say "Stop"

A supervisor does not need to know the rules: they need to intervene

There is a distinction many training programmes never address. Workers are asked to know the risks of their own job. Supervisors — the preposto under Italian law — are asked for something different: to oversee, to monitor, to notice, and at the decisive moment to stop a colleague who is doing something wrong, often a colleague with more seniority, in a department behind on delivery.

Art. 19 of Italy's Legislative Decree 81/2008 assigns supervisors their own duties of oversight and monitoring, including reporting the deficiencies they identify and intervening on non-compliance. These are behavioural duties, not knowledge-based ones. A lecture can explain them; it cannot train them.

If you want to frame the role first, start with the supervisor's role and responsibilities.

The updated training framework

The current reference is the State-Regions Agreement of 17 April 2025 (Rep. atti no. 59/CSR), adopted under art. 37 paragraph 2 of Legislative Decree 81/2008 and published in Official Gazette no. 119 of 24 May 2025 (source: Italian Ministry of Labour and Social Policies).

According to AiFOS summary sheets on the new Agreement, basic training for supervisors rises to 12 hours (previously 8) and refresher training is 6 hours every 2 years, with general and specific worker training as a prerequisite. We treat this as a summary from a sector source: for any specific case, always check the text of the Agreement.

For an overall picture of training obligations, see mandatory training and the State-Regions Agreement.

Why the e-learning ban is an opportunity

For supervisors, e-learning is expressly excluded, both for basic and for refresher training: the rule derives from art. 37 paragraph 7-ter of Legislative Decree 81/2008 as amended by Law 215/2021, and only physical attendance and synchronous videoconferencing are permitted (source: official Ministry of Labour FAQs on the State-Regions Agreement).

Many companies read this constraint as a cost. It is in fact a methodological indication: a supervisor's competences are relational and decision-based, and they can only be exercised with people present in the same space, physical or synchronous. The ban removes the worst shortcut — the course clicked through in a hurry — and forces real classroom design. With 12 hours available, the question becomes: what do we put in them?

Five playful formats that work

1. Role-play on calling someone out

The core of the role. Three rounds of a few minutes each: the supervisor must stop a non-compliant behaviour in front of a colleague played by the trainer or an actor. The variants that matter are the reactions: the person who minimises ("I've done it this way for twenty years"), the one who takes offence, the one who uses production as an argument. Observe with a structured rubric, and discuss not whether the supervisor "was polite" but whether the dangerous behaviour stopped.

2. Timed decision simulations

A situation on screen, ninety seconds to decide, no time to consult a manual. Effective scenarios all contain ambiguity: information is incomplete, the equipment is almost compliant, the colleague is almost authorised. The time constraint reproduces the supervisor's real condition and reveals the heuristics people actually use.

3. Cases with a production/safety dilemma

These produce the most useful discussion, because they name the conflict instead of denying it. Each group receives a case with explicitly opposing objectives and must justify its choice to the other groups. Management should attend at least this session: consistency between what is taught in the classroom and what is rewarded on the floor is the real critical factor.

4. Oversight escape room

A reconstructed environment with a set of hidden non-conformities: expired PPE, a removed guard, covered signage, a procedure replaced by a handwritten sheet. The team must find and rank them by severity within a set time. It trains exactly what art. 19 requires: noticing and reporting.

5. Gamified safety walk

A walk into the real department, in pairs, with a structured observation mission and an immediate debriefing. Less spectacular than the other formats, but the most transferable: it produces a habit that survives the course.

On the leadership component, which always surfaces in role-play, team building on safety leadership may be useful.

How to measure

Satisfaction sheets say nothing useful. More informative indicators:

• Structured observation in role-play: the percentage of scenarios in which the dangerous behaviour is actually interrupted, not merely commented on.
• Decision latency in timed simulations, compared between the start and the end of the course.
• Non-conformities identified in the escape room, broken down by severity.
• Reports filed by supervisors in the following three months: the only indicator that speaks to real behaviour.

None of these measures a reduction in accidents. Do not attribute one to the course: that would be a claim the available data do not support.

Mistakes to avoid

• Using the game as entertainment. If an activity does not train a capability required by the role, it is taking space from one that does.
• Putting supervisors in the room with their own bosses. The presence of the direct superior suppresses experimentation, which requires the right to get it wrong.
• Skipping the debriefing. An exercise without reprocessing produces anecdotes, not learning.
• Confusing the game with hands-on training. According to sector summaries of a 2025 INAIL-DIMEILA fact sheet on methodological guidance for training providers, virtual reality, simulators, gamification and serious games are considered complementary and not substitutive tools with respect to mandatory practical training. This is an indication reported by sector sources, but the principle is sound: no simulation replaces training on real equipment and procedures.
• Not updating the scenarios. Cases that do not resemble the participants' department get treated as schoolwork.

In short

Supervisor training succeeds not when people remember the rules, but when someone on the floor says "stop" at the moment it matters. The twelve mandatory hours, in person or by synchronous videoconference, are the chance to train that sentence rather than explain it.