Why Employee Training is Key to Ensuring Their Safety
Posted on 31st Jan, 2019 | By Lorretta Tatham
Employers have an obligation to protect their employees’ health and safety. Many of them may think that making sure signs and protective devices are available is the only way to do this. However, the best tool at an employer’s disposal is the one they tend to overlook – the employees themselves. Let’s look at why employee training is key to ensuring their safety.
Prevention Is Cheaper than Responding to Accidents
Preventing accidents and illnesses is far cheaper than providing first aid and implementing corrective actions. When you provide appropriate health and safety training, you reduce the odds of accidents and injuries occurring in the first place. Effective training in proper use of safety equipment like fall arrest harnesses prevents mistakes, especially among new hires. This reduces the risk everyone faces when there is an accident.
Training Enhances Productivity
Employee health and safety training helps businesses reduce the risk of injuries and accidents. In high-risk industries, this makes a major difference in productivity and the quality of life for employees.
For example, 3% of all British construction workers fall victim to injury, and 4% suffer a work-related illness. This takes them off the worksite, and it contributes to other workers being unhappy, eroding their effectiveness as well.
Conversely, a firm with a strong safety culture and high morale will retain workers and attract new ones. A side benefit of immersing new hires in safety training immediately is that they’ll feel cared about and competent in doing the job right, creating more trust between team members. They’ll work together more effectively, because the new hires aren’t seen as a danger to themselves and everyone else.
Training Contributes to a Culture of Safety
New hires should be given appropriate safety training immediately. This ensures that they know how to use safety equipment and protect themselves. This also impresses on them that the company values their safety.
Ongoing safety training maintains this atmosphere while ensuring experienced employees don’t take shortcuts in the name of productivity. Informed and empowered employees will make certain others follow safe practices, as well. When employees are fully educated in how to do their jobs safely, they’re capable of noticing when others are doing something wrong and demonstrating how it should be done. If someone continues to make mistakes, they will be referred to management and sent back for safety training instead of drummed out of their job or avoided by others.
It Is Necessary to Stay in Business
We’ve already addressed how prevention is cheaper than correcting and cleaning up accidents after they happen. However, businesses are increasingly tying contract awards to ethical considerations like the health and safety record of a firm. If you have a high accident rate, they may go with a higher bidder who has fewer accidents. Being able to prove that you have continuous professional development of your employees, including safety training, could help you keep up with industry standards and retain existing clients. On top of all of this, when employees know that their ability to continue working for the company is tied to their safety, they’ll enforce safety rules and take better care of themselves and each other.
Safety training should be more than holding regular classroom training sessions and handing out certificates. It should be an integral part of your safety culture that benefits your business and your employees in multiple ways.
Here at Browns Safety, we’re committed to safeguarding the physical health of both you and your employees, no matter what industry you work in. We offer a number of safety courses to help you mitigate risks at work. One of the most universally helpful is our first aid at work course – you can choose between our 1 day or 3 day variant. To book your place, you can use the on-site form, or simply give us a call on 01282 615517.
