As an employer, you would want your employees to complete their jobs and duties in a safe and efficient manner. Safety training aids in the prevention of workplace property damage, injuries, and, most importantly, deaths. It aids in the development of a safety culture in which employees are encouraged to follow proper safety measures and avoid hazards.
Regardless of the company, the most typical request from health and safety training clients is to make the training more engaging. They understand that the subject is dry, yet their staff must get through it and retain the information.
If you're looking for practical strategies to create a safety training program for your employees, this article can help you. Mentioned below are some of the best practices that you can follow to design an effective safety training program for your workforce.
1. Identify Your Workplace Risks and Hazards
The first thing you should do is do a risk assessment of the workplace. If you don't know what hazards you're trying to protect your workers from, your safety training won't be very effective.
A JHA or job hazard analysis is an excellent starting point. During a JHA, a group of people investigates a work environment and looks for hazards related to a specific job. Remember to allow employees to express their risk concerns as well, as their input is extremely valuable. The employees are exposed to these conditions on a daily basis, hence, they can provide crucial information about a risk that may not be apparent to the untrained eye.
2. Determine Your Training Goals
The cornerstone for how you conduct your training, as well as how you measure its performance, is establishing specific learning objectives. After you've determined your safety training needs as well as the workplace risks and hazards, you'll need to create effective learning objectives.
The learning objectives are simply what you want your employees to carry out while at work after the safety training is over. The objectives can be related to awareness, competence, behavior, or even operation.
3. Use Microlearning Content
The use of microlearning support resources helps to accelerate the learning process. They enhance memory retention and recall, allowing online learners to quickly obtain the information they require and apply it in the workplace to ensure everyone's safety.
Break down online training content into bite-sized modules and make it available to your employees through a learning management system.
4. Make the Safety Training Interesting.
Learners like to be involved, and the best way to do so is through interactivity. You can integrate interactions that demand learners to assess a situation and apply their knowledge to determine the ideal outcome using an LMS like the HSI.
Interactions can bring even the most boring training information to life, whether they're simple (like quizzes, drag and drop activities) or complex (like scenarios, simulations, interactive or animated videos).
5. Use repetition to your advantage.
When learners are exposed to knowledge multiple times, they are more likely to remember it. In safety training, try to use repetition to your advantage by returning to critical concepts numerous times within a session and even over multiple sessions.
You might also make important safety reminders available in a variety of ways, including verbally during training, digitally in an employee newsletter, and on posters or other visible items in the workplace.
6. Evaluate and improve
Your employees will only benefit from a safety training program if they learn from it and complete all of the objectives. As part of the training, conduct exams or assessments to gauge your participants' knowledge of safety subjects. The evaluation results will assist you in determining how to improve safety training.
7. Maintain well-organized records.
To keep track of which employees have learned which content, try to keep accurate records of safety training. This can assist you in planning the next training opportunities and ensuring that all relevant topics are covered adequately.
Conclusion
Employers can profit from a safety training program in a variety of ways, including decreased insurance costs, fewer injuries, and improved employee morale. You can strategically build a successful safety training program for your workers by following the above recommendations.
