It’s a legal requirement to ensure new employees understand the hazards and safety risks within their work environment, and safety induction training is the first step in that process. This is where compliance obligations and duty of care requirements are met and new employees receive training to keep them safe at work from day one.
Organisations are faced with the challenge of how to effectively design and deliver a safety induction, that leads to an employee being engaged, productive, aware of systems and procedures and understanding hazards [read our article on hazard perception and common sense].
It’s common for employees to become complacent with safety induction training due to its repetitive delivery, legalistic content and lack of participation. A new employee may have completed a number of safety inductions in the past where their immediate thought is: “How quickly can I get through this training?”
In this article, we look at what should be covered in a safety induction and discuss the benefits of interactive delivery methods.
What Should Your Safety Induction Cover?
An effective safety induction involves familiarising new employees with the hazards they are likely to encounter while working, so they can conduct themselves in a manner that doesn’t endanger themselves or anyone else. The safety induction should also ensure that workers understand their health and safety responsibilities.
For safety induction training to be meaningful, it needs to address specific issues that employees will encounter in their work environment. The content should include task-specific and current hazards, rather than generic hazards.
Here is a list of the main areas safety inductions should cover:
- Inform the employees about hazards and risks in their workplace.
- The organisation’s health and safety policies and procedures.
- Emphasise the importance of sticking to safe work practices.
- The responsibility employees have in reducing incidents and accidents.
- Employees responsibility for ensuring their own safety and the safety of others, as well as protecting their work environment.
- The workplace’s rules about smoking, breaks and the code of conduct.
- The procedures for reporting incidences and injuries and near misses.
- The evacuation and emergency procedures for the worksite, including emergency exits, evacuation instructions, assembly points and the use of fire alarms and fire fighting equipment.
- Inform employees about first aid and other emergency contacts.
- If an employee’s job involves high-risk activity such as the operation of machinery or handling hazardous chemicals and dangerous goods, it’s important that they are properly trained, understand any associated risks, and have access to appropriate personal protective equipment.
Read our article, No Time to Deliver Safety Induction Training.
Employees Learn Better With Interactive Training
Running safety inductions online is the most practical, convenient, cost-effective way to manage health and safety training for employees. However, online delivery shouldn’t be classroom training that’s rehashed to be delivered online. Learners need ownership, an active role in the process and relevance. This will produce a learning interaction that guides and embeds knowledge that will be ingrained during subsequent work practices.
Safety training delivery is changing and changing fast due to new employees being part of a technology-savvy generation [see our article on immersive training methods]. Their expectation of receiving interactive, relevant safety training is influenced by their increased use of smartphones, gaming platforms, social media and real-time interactions with global peers on a daily basis.
Training is no longer consumed by this generation, as it’s been in the past via passive deliveries, e.g. classroom chalk and talk. There’s now more emphasis than ever to create engaging learning experiences that adopt virtual technologies and digital sites. Proactive hazard identification learning activities in safety inductions have been shown to embed knowledge and significantly reduce workplace incidents and injuries.
Read our article, How Do You Write an Engaging Safety Induction?
Engaging Training Provides Results
Sky, a media entertainment company and largest pay-TV broadcaster in Europe was facing high rates of employee turnover and high per-capita spending on face-to-face training. With new starters required to complete up to 10 hours of discretionary learning before they even joined, the new induction program had to be engaging. They designed an e-learning adventure involving questions, competitions and role play in virtual worlds.
After the first year of the program sales conversations for new starters increased in week one, and 37.5 hours were saved in training each recruit. Approximately 1 million pounds per year was saved in induction delivery costs, and return on investment for the redesign was achieved within six months.
Read our article, Can MicroLearning Improve Safety Training?
Embracing Technology
Don’t worry if you aren’t ready for role-playing in virtual worlds, you can use online delivery methods that include 360-degree photographic panoramas of real worksites, videos and micro-learning to deliver your safety induction training.
At Tap into Safety, we can build your safety induction training for you to use online, on tablets or incorporate into your classroom learning. We use our simple modularised template where we plug in our out of the box courses from our library, or we build fully customised content for you. Also, you can have numerous versions of your Online Safety Induction to cover General Employees, Visitors, Contractors or Site, Area or Role-Specific requirements.
We use an engaging training method that includes 360-degree panoramic scenes, animated micro-learning, videos, audio and subtitles, reduced text, and robust assessment of controls and critical controls. Our training has the end-user in mind the whole time, and we support workers with low literacy or English as a secondary language. We save you time and money, and there is no need to facilitate the learning.
As a client of the Tap into Safety Integrated eLearning Platform you also have access to a library of courses that has over 110 courses to improve workplace safety, leadership skills, supervisor skills, mental health literacy, governance and compliance. Use all courses or just one, you only have to pay for what you use, or we also offer unlimited annual use plans that you’ll find are easily affordable.
Don’t just take our word for it though, here is what one of our clients has to say.
“By incorporating Tap into Safety in our induction program, we have an engaging mechanism for clearly communicating key and critical controls associated with our high risk activities. The reports generated, provide an invaluable tool through which we can now accurately identify and address any knowledge gaps prior to workers commencing.” Daryl Marshall, National Safety & Compliance Manager Asplundh Tree Expert Australia
Enhance your induction training today, contact us for your free demonstration.