Safer & Stronger – 5 Ways Health & Safety Training of Employees Can Improve Your Workplace

 

5 Ways – Health & Safety Training of Employees Can Improve Your Workplace

 

In 2018, Teresa Webster suffered a terrible workplace accident. Slipping on leaked coolant that had been spilled over the floor, Webster fell and badly injured her head. She was further injured by a tray of industrial screws that fell on top of her as she tried to catch herself from falling in her cluttered, dangerous workplace. Webster suffered a terrible head injury, including internal bleeding.

The company assigned Ms. Webster a chiropractor to help with the pain without considering that there might be other medical concerns. With no medical diagnosis provided, Ms. Webster continued to suffer from terrible headaches even after the chiropractic consultation until she became temporarily bedridden and finally received medical attention without the company’s direction. In 2021, Webster sued for worker’s compensation and negligence, leaving court with her medical expenses, legal fees, lost pay, and a hefty additional amount for the distress she suffered.

According to the US Bureau of Labour, about one in thirty full-time workers has suffered from a workplace accident in the United States. With the massive resurgence of employees returning to work and companies looking to swell up their ranks with new hires after the pandemic, this number will likely go up soon. To stop this, employers need to invest in health and safety training to re-educate old employees and quickly train new ones on the procedures to stay safe.

Workplace accidents can lead to expensive bills and lawsuits, and a hazardous workplace drops morale tremendously. The knowledge that workplace accidents are common can lead to increased stress and decreased productivity, as well as higher rates of attrition. A study in the international journal of environmental research and public health found that construction workers who felt safe with their training and equipment had massively higher job satisfaction and worked faster and more efficiently.

Of all safety training, the following are the ones will usually have the largest impact on your workforce.

 

1. Hazard Prevention Training

Hazard prevention is everything from keeping the office clear of tripping hazards like loose wires to administrative issues like electrical hazards. Effective hazard prevention requires employees to take responsibility for their office environment and point out likely causes for concern, small and big. These can prevent many costly and embarrassing mess-ups before they happen. Knowing the workplace is safe can also be a huge morale boost for employees, allowing them to focus on the job instead of stressing over possible workplace injuries.

 

2. Equipment Safety

While not relevant to every industry, many companies work with dangerous equipment. Vehicles, power tools, medical lasers, and toxic chemicals are just some examples of workplace items that can be extremely dangerous if not handled with care. Companies that take equipment safety seriously enjoy similar improvements in employee loyalty and efficiency. With good equipment safety, your company can get around the awful situation of a workplace accident that can seriously hurt valuable employees and send production back several days or longer.

 

3. Hazard Response Training

When prevention is unsuccessful, a good business needs a backup plan. While some large offices can have a doctor on standby, first aid should be readily available in every workplace. Many offices have first aid kits in prominent locations, but it’s also necessary to have people trained to use them at a moment’s notice. For serious emergencies, companies should also have clearly outlined ambulance protocol. Ensuring these protocols are clearly outlined and universally understood can save time and create order in an otherwise chaotic situation, leading to faster results, saving costs, and potentially even lives.

 

4. Safety Training for Confined Space Work

A confined workspace can make every other safety hazard massively more dangerous. Equipment hazards, fire and electrical hazards, and even day-to-day hazards like a cluttered workplace or spill are far more dangerous in confined conditions, so it’s doubly important that employees working in such conditions, such as construction workers, maritime workers in ships, docks, and rigs, and other jobs that necessitate cramped working conditions be trained in all the ways they should respond to safety hazards, both general and specific to the industry, since they’re at far more risk of severe consequences if something were to go wrong.

 

5. Hygiene and Environment Training

With the recent pandemic, the concern of office hygiene is on people’s minds far more often than before. Taking measures to prevent even minor illnesses can have a massive impact on productivity. Offices that don’t get sick don’t have as many sick leaves. Healthy employees are more energized and productive. Even something as simple as a clean desk can have an impact on the office. Getting employees to take these things seriously isn’t always easy, but good training programs that spread awareness of the value of a clean working environment can boost office productivity substantially.

 

G-Cube believes that these trainings should not be just one-time events, but a full-fledged learning program to not only educate your employees but to build the behavior which keeps health and safety at the top of the mind. Employees should feel that health and safety trainings are not just a formality but a life-saver, not only for them but also their families and friends.

Reducing of Time to Productivity

 

Large product portfolios with varying level of complexities for new teams with different levels of skills and knowledge. Have we been able to state the most basic issue of your life as BFSI leader? Our gut feeling is that we have. Longer time to productivity usually always means lesser time at peak productivity due to compliance mandates and certifications in your industry.

Thus, the basic and foremost requirement of any BFSI organization is to achieve shorter TTP and here are 5 steps to do the same. All you need is the right LMS.

Step 1: Pre-joining Engagement

The idea is to identify the skills and abilities of each individual right at the time of joining so there is no wastage of time and effort. The information can be captured on the LMS which can then deploy trainings according to the levels at which the employee currently is. A pre-joining training kit which may contain information about the organization, leadership, payroll etc also helps the employees settle down faster with the company with a sense of belonging.

The pre-joining involvement through the LMS creates the opportunity to deploy all the basic training modules related to the company’s products and key phrases or industry jargon so that your new-hires can hit the floor running. Of course, these will be material which are available on the public domain and are not proprietary documents. 

Step 2: Creating Personalized Learning Path

With information gathered and basic training deployed in the previous step, an effective LMS can then assign automated training to a new hire to bring them at par with others in their batch or even move someone to advanced batches if they are ahead of the others. Keeping in mind the different skill levels, talents and learning styles, a good learning management system can create a learning path for individuals based on multiple factors and help them to find what they are good at and truly enjoy doing. This in-turn helps them achieve peak performance faster.

As the learning is mapped to the job role or product an individual is handling, the LMS can throw up timely notifications required for certification or guideline updates which otherwise leads to confusions and loss of productivity.

Step 3: Create Immersive Learning Experience

The number of products in BFSI is extensive and often riddled with complexities that employees must navigate and be able to explain in simple language. This means they require in-depth understanding of the product, which is easy to deliver through interactive media via an LMS. Trainees are offered life-like simulations for scenarios, understanding of product combinations and with inputs from sales teams for real questions asked by customers. What they get is an immersive experience and are more confident to achieve peak performance faster.

Small learning nuggets can be sent to the employees at regular intervals, automated through the LMS. This ensures continued and reinforced learning which reduces knowledge loss and creates better customer experience.

Step 4: Segregate Experience Employees from new ones

Segregation of training programs and content based on who the audience is effectively reduces time lost in futile training or retraining. An LMS is again key to this step to achieve desired results. For example, the same product needs to have two deliveries. For basic level folks who need more detailed explanations and an advanced level for whom it can be a quick upskill intervention. As your LMS already has the learning data of each individual, it can help you identify the right kind of training required for a particular individual who is at a particular level of understanding or experience.  

Step 5: Make Learning an Agile Process

A company that has a tradition of agility will always find it easier to handle bumps in the road. Like most things, training processes and systems also experience fatigue and become outdated very quickly. BFSI companies need to invest in an LMS that are built to handle and respond to update needs in an intelligent way. A good LMS will allow deployment of changes, alerts to roles who need to learn or get certified, and also give leadership visibility to the status of certifications, especially those that fall under the compliance umbrella.

Knowledge is very liquid and relative, especially as the typical time in a role gets impacted by attrition, role change or promotions. Leaders need to be able to get more time per resource at peak productivity and the right LMS can be an ideal partner to help organizations achieve their Time to Productivity goals.

At GCube, we have 20 years of experience and 80+ industry awards in learning technologies. To know more about products and services, please do write to us.