Training employees on safety measures is crucial at any workplace. It ensures that employees are up to date with the current safety protocols available to them in emergencies – and a safe working space can motivate employees.
Employee safety training has to be done meticulously and covers several different safety aspects. Here are crucial elements you should keep in mind when organizing effective safety training at your workplace.
Focus on the Workplace Health Hazards
Hazards are unique to their respective workplaces. Before starting a safety training lesson, it is wise to establish all safety hazards in your working area. The list will be longer if you have different departments or are dealing with manual laborers. When listing down these hazards, do not overlook common culprits such as electrical faults, gas leaks, and water leakage.
Once you have established all possible workplace hazards, feel free to categorize different classes of employees who are likely to experience these hazards and develop ways to mitigate them if they happen.
Consult with the Experts
If you want to be effective and deliver value to your employees, then outsource a safety trainer instead of doing things in-house. A safety expert comes with a set of experience in the given field and can efficiently deliver the message. Outsourcing does not exclusively involve in-person visits. There are many ways, for example, by which eLearning is being used in the Canadian safety training industry. eLearning gives you access to professionally created training content, methods, and procedures. It is the best alternative to outsourcing expensive training facilitators.
Set Clear Objectives
Objectives are clearly stated goals of the training. What do you want the employees to learn at the end of each session or chapter? Setting clear objectives keeps you on track throughout the exercise and streamlines the process of developing training materials. Lastly, objectives state what you expect from your employees during the training and what they will gain out of the activity. Increasingly, gamification is being used to hammer these objectives home.
Know Your Employees
Are your employees ready to take part in this training? What are their ages and physical capabilities? These are some of the critical questions you should ask yourself before designing or picking a course for your employees. If you have disabled employees, you will have to create training activities that accommodate their inadequacies. Age differences in your workforce may require you to change the way you deliver safety training.
Control Your Hazards
After identifying your hazards, the next step should be controlling them. Once eliminated, employees will feel safer and be more productive in their workplaces. According to safety experts, employers should use a hierarchy control approach in managing workplace hazards. This control system has five steps as follows:
- Elimination control
- Substitution control
- Engineering control
- Work protocol control
- PPE control
These methods are hierarchical, and personal protective equipment is always the last resort in controlling workplace hazards.
Wrapping Up
Employee training is essential as it increases their productivity while keeping them safe. Without safety knowledge and precautions, workplace hazards can lead to injuries and fatalities, resulting in considerable fines in injury claims by the victims.
Featured Image: Mufid Majnun, Unsplash.
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