The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 requires businesses to provide whatever information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of their employees. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 expands upon this, which identifies situations where health and safety training is particularly important, including:
- When people start work (induction training)
- When exposed to new or increased risks
- Where existing skills may need updating
- Young employees such as apprentices who are new to an industry or set of work processes
The benefits of effective health and safety training
Besides maintaining legal compliance, there are many other benefits related to providing adequate, relevant and timely training in all matters relating to health and safety, ranging from engaging employees in taking personal accountability through to the most important one – minimising the risks related to work-related ill-health and injury.
How has Covid impacted the ability for employers to deliver and manage effective health and safety training?
The pandemic posed various challenges to businesses regarding health and safety training most of which surrounded new working from home practices and the need to convert traditional face to face training to digital formats – virtual training courses and eLearning channels.
James Sharp, CTO for Riskex is a qualified health and safety professional. In this blog, he shares his insights regarding converting face to face training to online training. James regularly delivers health and safety training, especially on the subjects of COSHH and General Safety Risk Assessments.
James outlines the following points as the key challenges he has faced delivering health and safety training during the pandemic:
- Building practical exercises into training. When delivering training on a client site, it is easy to design “shop floor” exercises into the event – when delivering online you can still do this but usually via scenarios rather than “live exercises” in the working environment.
- Effectively and dynamically assessing engagement and understanding from each delegate. Without the benefit of being able to see every delegate’s body language and facial expressions (groups of 12 people are difficult to see clearly on screen), it can sometimes be tricky to see if anyone is struggling to keep up or absorb information. Building rapport online is often more difficult than in face-to-face scenarios.
- The nature of online training means it’s often difficult to maintain interactivity – many people are still uncomfortable contributing in online environments.
- Despite the fact we now live in a digital age, connectivity issues are not uncommon, leading to suboptimal learning environments.
- Attendance can often be lower than expected, either because of connectivity issues or distractions whilst working from home.
How can AssessNET help?
The AssessNET Training Management Module provides your managers with a real-time view of the training status of their team, allowing them to address compliance gaps and plan employee learning and development needs.
