Developing a policy for your business’s management of health and safety is a first step many SME’s makes when growing as a company. One of the ways that you can start to implement better health and safety management is through incorporating more EHS specific training in your employee development programme.
Unfortunately, when many workers hear the words ‘health and safety’ and ‘training’, it conjures up feelings of intense boredom and wasted time. This is a challenge as training providers start off on the back foot. One of the ways that you can help implement engaging HSE training is through focusing on delivering it from a positive perspective.
Make sure you involve all employees in health and safety training
One of the big mistakes many organisations make when training health and safety individuals is making them just that, individual. This can lead to them becoming isolated in their jobs, and not taken seriously by the rest of the workforce. If you take steps to include all workers in health and safety training, this can lead to the whole business feeling empowered to enact positive changes.
This can be done by encouraging workers to speak up, in group discussions. In terms of training, team building days can be utilised to bring the workforce together for all sorts of development, including health and safety.
Focus on the employee development aspect of the training
Some workers may be put off by the idea of training as they may view it as a waste of time. One of the ways that you can frame it in a positive way is emphasizing the career development that can be experienced from the training. This works well with accreditations and qualifications that can improve employability within the health and safety jobs sector.
Reward good behavioural safety examples that result from the training
Research suggests that giving positive encouragement when it comes to feedback is a great deal more effective than negative feedback. Keeping this in mind when evaluating the results from your training is important. Make sure you reward any positive changes in behaviour from a safety perspective with plenty of encouragement.
Always encourage employees to learn more about health and safety to train themselves
Many take the view that when one leaves school or university the learning portion of their career is over, however, this is a mistake. The most successful individuals, be it in safety or other fields adopt a lifelong learning approach. Scheduling in regular points of ‘safety reflection’ will encourage workers to keep learning about how they can improve their management of health and safety.
Our interview with Sir Clive Woodward details how those who want to be a success need to be a sponge, not a rock. It is safe to say that if you want to increase the quality of your health and safety management, those conducting it need to a be a sponge, taking on as much new knowledge as they can.
