Keeping your employees safe with engaging health and safety training

Maintaining health and safety compliance in the workplace is one of the biggest challenges that affects you, your employees and your organisation. In fact, statistics show that more than 200 workers die daily from work-related accidents or diseases in South Africa, while more than a million individuals worldwide are injured annually. With these high statistics, it is crucial to keep your employees safe and free from any hazardous situations. The health and safety of your employees should be of paramount importance. Not only do you have a legal duty to protect your employees, but it is also good business practice to obey health and safety regulations. Not adhering can cause you to not only lose staff, but it can also affect your employees’ productivity, and your company’s profitability.

So, how can you keep your staff informed and upskilled on health and safety practices to ensure a safe work environment? By providing an efficient and effective health and safety training programme to your employees.

Health and safety training is a necessity as it:

• Ensures that your employees are not at risk by the work they do which reduces illness and accidents;
• Develops a positive health and safety culture among employees;
• Helps to create a safe working environment for your employees;
• Helps your organisation avoid unnecessary workplace incidents.

Although health and safety training is a crucial and life-saving requirement, it can often be regarded as tedious and boring. Fortunately, that can be changed.

We’ve listed four tips you can implement to create effective and engaging health and safety training programmes:

1. Ensure training is micro, continuous, and easily accessible

In order for training to be effective, it needs to be a continuous process. Providing continuous and anytime-access to safety training content allows your employees to refresh their memory when needed. Dividing your training into manageable chunks that can be accessed, digested and spaced help reinforce what is being learned.

To ensure that your employees have continued access to your training content, consider creating a library of health and safety training content, so that instead of having to wait for a training session, employees can complete training in their own time and at their own pace.

2. Ensure that the training is relevant

Training can either enhance or diminish employees’ motivation. When curating training material, you should always consider your audience and ensure that you make the training relevant to them. For example, it should be clear to the employees how the training programme directly relates to their daily tasks and their role in the company.

3. Combine your training content

Don’t settle for one type of training content to train your employees. Using a range of different mediums can make health and safety training more engaging and memorable, as well as help your employees understand and retain the message better. Online courses, microlearning, instructor-led classes and other training practices, such as interactive sessions present your training content in a more attractive and attention-grabbing manner through the use of multimedia elements such as images, animations, and videos.

4. Make use of simulations

Simulations, a bit more complex that imaginary scenarios, offer employees the chance to apply their new knowledge and skills to an imitation of a real event. Training through simulation is a very active instructional method and helps your employees improve their understanding of certain situations and build practical experience. When implementing a simulation, it is important to consider time. For example, when you develop a simulation to prevent a fire outbreak, you should keep the average reaction time in a situation close to a real-life situation.

Maintaining health and safety practices is essential to ensure your employees’ welfare in the workplace and to keep their productivity optimised. The opportunities are endless when it comes to creating engaging training experiences, but the key is to find the right training solution for your employees.

For any assistance with your health and safety training needs, contact Lesson Desk’s learning and development specialists at learn@lessondesk.com or visit our website for more information.