Safety training is among the few critical processes employers should invest in to help prevent property damage at the workplace, injuries and, certainly, deaths. It helps to establish a safety culture in which the workers can promote the right safety procedures and avoid hazards.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Government Labor Organization in the US have set the safety and health standards for employees. Hence, it's important to develop an effective safety training program to ensure that you meet all the standards and regulations.
As an employer, you want your workers to execute tasks and perform their duties safely and effectively. If you are looking for effective ways to design a safety training program for your employees, you have come to the right page.
Here are the six efficient ways for designing a safety program for your employees:
1. Analyze The Training Needs
The best way to start designing a safety training program for your employees is by asking yourself if the training will solve the problem at hand. The bottom line of this step is to help you identify the training needs.
One of the easy ways to identify such needs is by checking the current organizational safety record. This means that you need to determine whether the problem stems from employee performance in the workplace environment. In this case, training will be more effective when the problem is how your employees are performing.
When it comes to assessing the workers' performance problems, it's crucial to examine the type of issue and the best approach. For instance: When your employees suffer from back pain due to poor office seats, you may have to invest in better-quality chairs that come equipped with special ergonomic features and adjustments. Here are some of them at Posturion.
2. Identify The Workplace Risks And Hazards
Your safety training program won’t be effective if you don’t know the workplace risks and hazards. Knowing the workplace risks and hazards will allow you to easily identify the specific training needs to address the knowledge gap.
You can achieve this by performing a proper assessment of daily hazards and risks present or specific to your workplace. You should also allow employees to express their risk concerns as their opinion matters a lot. Given that the employees work in these conditions every day, they can give essential insights about a risk that may not be obvious to the untrained eye.
You will also want to analyze other possible safety hazards that may emerge along the way. However, you need to distinguish workplace risks like building layout from machinery-related risks and environmental hazards.
This will ensure that you develop an appropriate safety training program to bring out a proper safety culture among your employees.
3. Set The Training Objectives
Once the safety training needs and the workplace risks and hazards have been identified, you need to develop effective learning objectives. Training experiences should go hand in hand with your objectives and goals for the safety training's efficiency and functionality.
The learning objectives are simply what you want your employees to carry out while at work after the safety training is over. Sometimes the objectives can be related to awareness, skill, behavior, or even procedure.
So, you need to come up with effective learning objectives, which must be clear and measurable. This is to ensure that you can evaluate and revise the training at a later date.
Your training objectives should also precisely spell out the desired skill or expected behavior using action-oriented language. The best thing about detailed safety training objectives is that they will help you and your employees understand the expected outcomes.
4. Write A Protocol For Your Employees
Upon setting the training objectives, you need to develop a protocol for your employees. The protocol should outline all the learning activities you want the employees to engage in. The learning activities should support the training objectives and help you realize all the training goals.
Your protocol should also include the methods of training, materials, and resources to be needed for effective workplace safety training. When choosing the materials, resources, and methods to use, you must be very careful to select the best. This will ensure that the training conveys the message effectively.
Whether you decide to use a group or one-to-one person, make sure that the method rhymes with your audience and the skill or behavior you want to instill. Possibly, learning activities should give the employees a chance to demonstrate the skill and knowledge acquired from the training. They should apply directly to the employee’s actual job.
5. Implement The Plan
Now that you have already written the safety training plan, you need to schedule and conduct the training.
Safety training should be presented in a clear and organized way to maximize learning. Ideally, you should begin by providing the employees a training overview to know what to expect.
The whole training should also be related to the employee’s work experience for relevance and easy application. Once you have conducted the safety training program, follow up by emphasizing the lessons learned.
If you find it hard to keep the employees motivated and interested in learning, you can participate and practice their new skills during the training. Keep in mind that active participation and hands-on practice encourage new information retention.
6. Evaluate And Revise The Training
A safety training program is only successful if your employees learn from it and achieve all the objectives. So, the last thing is to develop a policy on how you will evaluate the training as you can’t know about its success without evaluation.
You can ask the trainees for feedback and use the help of supervisors who can observe the employee behavior before and after the training. The results you obtain from the evaluation will help you know how to improve the safety training.
Final Thoughts
Employers can greatly benefit from a safety training program in many ways, from lower insurance premiums to reduced injuries and better employee morale. You can follow the above guidelines to design an effective safety training program for your employees.
If you are working from home, you can benefit from these actionable tips on making your home office comfortable and productive while implementing safety training saves you money.
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