What is occupational safety training?

Occupational safety training is a procedure that teaches employees how to work in a way that avoids injury to themselves and their colleagues.

Furthermore, one of the components of an effective workplace safety plan is instructions and guidance on how to identify hazards, report them and how to handle the incidents.

A healthy culture of therapeutic communication about incidents should lead to an easy formula of building a safer workplace, and uncover how your business can improve the workplace.

Steps to an effective workplace safety training program

Identify business needs

Identify the needs of your company (target, threat, training goal); do the same for past incidents and potential future incidents, if any (past, potential threat, training goal); and finally, do the same for known threats in your industry (industry-specific threat, training goal, alternative solutions to training – might be protective equipment/ apparel, additional warning signs, counselling, etc).

Include your employees

Involve you staff in developing, implementing and refining your program. You should give managers, supervisors and employees the opportunity to provide input – they are your best resource for how work is done and what hazards may pose challenges to safety and health.

Applies to all roles

Develop modular training and testing procedures suited to any company role that comply with regulations: a work description might state that – while a knife-safety procedure is the same for a waiter and a cook – fire safety might be different, and so might the handling of cleaning materials.

Include managers

Train the managers and supervisors on your team in what is required to keep the team safe, so that they can identify failures in the compliance of team members with safety norms.

Create communication channels

Establish reporting channels for all hazards as part of your training so that all employees know who to contact and how to prevent a potential accident.

Test release

Quizzes and surprise spot inspections are equally good tools for testing your programme’s ability to keep people safe before the accident rudely informs you that it actually doesn’t.

Make it continuous

Make the training always available when needed, for prompt refreshing. For example, the employee who was trained six months ago about the safety requirements that govern the operations of a given machine? They will be more likely to remain safe if you make the training course content always available to him so that he can promptly refresh his memory.

How Occupational Safety Training can help

So that they can do their work to the best advantage to you, all your employees need to be trained satisfactorily on what they need to do, and how and when they do it, including health and safety problems. Whilst a system of safe working practices and adequate safety equipment may be costly to put into effect, the consequences of not doing so can be extremely serious.

Employees will acquire new skills and knowledge and upgrade their existing ones through an Occupational Health and Safety Training (OHS). The attendees will reaffirm old quality work routines and become subject of behavioural changes. Profiting from an employee training brings rise to employees’ skills and knowledge as well as production and morale. Meanwhile, replacing and avoidance of workplace incidents will be the end product.

The Importance of OHS Training

While health and safety at work are clearly instinctive dispositions for everyone and others around, there is much more to invoking these notions regarding workplace health and safety. This includes:

• Community expectations that organisations have a responsibility for those that work for them.
• Legal obligations.
• Insurable costs such as worker’s compensation premium that is linked to OHS performance.
• Uninsurable cost such as time lost due to injury, reduced productivity, staff replacement, retraining costs as well as loss to reputation.
• Costs to the community, such as health services, rehabilitation and loss of skilled labour.
• Costs to employees in terms of lower quality of life after a workplace injury or disease, loss of income for the injured and their families, and grief for everyone.

Health and Safety Representatives

Health and safety representatives (HSRs) are those elected to represent the workers in the company on health and safety issues and facilitate communication between employers and employees on health and safety related issues. HSRs will consider the health and safety measures taken by the business, investigate complaints from workers and investigate any issues relating to risk to the health and safety of those workers.

In addition to directing unsafe work to cease if, after reasonable consultation, they have a reasonable concern that carrying out the work could constitute an immediate and serious risk to a worker’s health or safety, once an HSR satisfactorily completes an approved HSR training course, they can also issue a direction to cease all work when they have a reasonable concern that allegedly unsafe work cannot be done without risk to a worker.

Having a health and safety representative fosters a safer work environment for your employees by ensuring that your OHS concerns, (some of which, by their very nature, you will not have known about) are brought to the forefront where you otherwise may not have known of them. HSRs act as a practical set of eyes on the ground and can show you where those hazards that just escaped your attention may sit in your workplaces. They also promote safe work practices to all employees. Since an elected HSR is one of your employees, your workforce will be more at ease approaching and interacting with the very people with whom they share the workplace.