Does this scenario look uncomfortably familiar? If so, here are several actions you can take to get your safety committee excited, involved—and committed—to complementing and strengthening workplace safety and training.
Safety Planning
If you don’t already have a safety program, or you have one but need to update it, you can use your safety committee to help identify goals for the safety program and put together a plan to accomplish those goals. Since the goals have been developed with the participation of the safety committee, the members are more likely to feel they have a stake in the success of the safety program and assist with working toward those goals.
Policies and Procedures
Use your safety committee to develop safety-related policies and procedures. Since the safety committee is drawn from your workforce, these folks have hands-on knowledge of the jobs covered by these policies and procedures. This will help ensure that your safety policies and procedures make sense for the workers covered by them.
Safety Management, Evaluation, and Review
Your safety committee members can periodically review your safety program to keep it up to date and relevant with what’s going on in your workplace. They can also evaluate whether and how well the safety program is functioning from an employee perspective.
Communication
The safety committee can act as a conduit for safety communication from employees to management and vice versa. Also, if you establish your safety committee as a central clearinghouse for concerns and complaints, employees know where to take their concerns to have them addressed.
Safety Training
Above and beyond required training, safety committees can provide insight into additional training that would help workers perform their jobs more safely and effectively. Committee members can also help with determining how best to effectively deliver training (live, computer, hands-on, classroom, etc.).
Need more safety training resources? Try Training Today’s Safety Library. The Workplace Safety Training Library includes everything you need to increase awareness of general safety practices and achieve compliance with national OHSA and state workplace safety rules and regulations. Find out more here.
Safety Meetings
Safety committee members can be invaluable in general employee safety meetings by encouraging participation, developing materials, suggesting meeting topics, and making presentations at the meetings.
Hazard Identification and Control
Safety committees, either in whole or in part, can perform regular safety inspections, investigate reports of hazardous conditions, review or assist in accident investigations, and audit inspections done by others or audit corrective actions for reported hazards to ensure that they have been done properly. Using the safety committee, especially if personnel are rotated through, not only provides a fresh set of eyes for identifying hazards but also gives employees an added sense of ownership.
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The Training Today site automatically documents training. As trainees sign on, their identifications are automatically registered. When the program is completed, the trainee’s score is entered. So, when you want to see who has been trained on any subject, or look at the across-the-board activity of any one employee, it’s all there, instantly available to you, your boss, an inspector—even a plaintiff’s attorney.
Course certificates can be automatically generated from within the training center and are automatically retained for recordkeeping purposes.
Unlimited Training That Won’t Bust the Budget
Best of all, in these budget-crunching times, BLR’s Training Today site costs only a fraction of what you would pay for a learning management system (LMS). You always know exactly what training will cost, no matter how many programs you use, or how many times you use them. There’s just one low annual fee—for unlimited training—calculated by the size of your workforce. Budget once and you’re done!
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