A workplace health and safety considerations checklist
If there could be such a thing as a positive outcome from Covid-19, it’s that workplace safety, health and wellbeing has been elevated to a tier one consideration for many organisations and its individuals. Which is really where it always should have been.
The key to creating a physically and mentally healthier workplace culture however, is to not treat responses to occupational health and safety risk with quick fixes, to try and plaster over specific challenges.
Health and safety training is often the biggest tick-box for compliance, but how do you embed training into the rest of your health and safety risk management processes to effectively manage health and safety risk and evidence compliance when it matters?
Take a look at our 8 considerations for developing a safer culture:
1. Check the credibility of your corporate health and safety training
Who designs and supplies your corporate health and safety training and what’s their knowledge and understanding of what is new or important in health and safety? Most Health and Safety eLearning providers work with RoSPA and their customers to ensure their health and safety training content is relevant and up to date. Ensure you have access to CPD-certified health and safety training content and health and safety courses that are RoSPA assured.
2. Consider sector-agnostic health and safety eLearning
This will give you access to a much broader range of health and safety content. Most manual handling courses for example could be applicable for office environments, warehouse locations, manufacturing settings etc.
3. Consider how your workplace safety training is delivered
For example, most effective eLearning is delivered in the form of pathways to evaluate and assess learning and learner engagement with assigned training. For example, any good eLearning course should be followed by an assessment, which is particularly vital for any compliance training to evidence comprehension. An added element to consider in a learning pathway is a risk checklist questionnaire, for learners to begin applying their training to real situations that may arise in your business.
4. Do you offer employees refresher health and safety training?
Health and safety refresher training needn’t always be as detailed as the original course if employees can demonstrate they know or remember enough from the first time they took it.
5. Is your health and safety eLearning fully mobile-responsive?
More and more learning is being completed on tablets and smartphones, so having a mobile-first approach to your online health and safety training ensures your employees can access their training on any device, at any time, making your organisation’s compliance training easily accessible anytime and anywhere your learners require it. Particularly important for businesses with remote staff or where employees don’t easily have access to a desktop.
6. Does your online health and safety training integrate with your operational risk management tools?
Do have everything you need to maintain health and safety compliance accessible in one place or using multiple tools, spreadsheets and platforms? Giving your health and safety administrators and HR team access to all health and safety training and management data, incident reports, audit checklists and completed risk assessments and injury reports in one place helps maintain compliance, but also frees up time to spend on strategic health and safety initiatives.
7. What about evidencing the health and safety compliance of employees, and your organisation more generally?
Offering health and safety training is only a small part of the risk management process but if you can’t evidence compliance, you could be putting your employees and organisation at risk. Your health and safety e learning should have data and analytics available for those responsible for health and safety in your organisation to track, review and assess. With supporting risk management tools, you should be able to configure workflows, upload health and safety policies and procedures and evidence that employees have seen and understood them. After all these should be living documents and processes and enable you to identify trends or gaps in your health and safety management.
8. Stay up to date with how legislation and best practice guidelines are changing
Though many organisations likely think they’ve got a handle on the pandemic, legislative and best practice guidance is still constantly evolving. As such, having a way to log Covid-19 symptoms in a fast and efficient way, appropriate Covid-19 training for staff and managers, along with a process to notify responsible individuals can help keep your employees safe as the nature of the pandemic and scientific advice changes, and keeping your organisation compliant. Now is not the time for complacency.
A safer culture isn’t created through tick-box compliance, it permeates your people and processes and is largely achieved and embedded when your workforce knows how to effectively recognise and respond to operational risks that are relevant to your business. But this can only be achieved with ways of successfully tracking, monitoring and evidencing each area of compliant – and importantly being honest about any gaps that could grow into risks.
Access Health & Safety provides the right combination of health & safety training and risk management tools to help you embed a safety culture throughout your organisation. Discover more about our health and safety software.
