HR Management & Compliance

Get Your Safety Committees Committed!

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.
Want more ideas and resources to keep your safety commitment alive and well throughout your company? We’ve got good news about a valuable training application that can help you train and track employees’ progress.
It’s called Training Today. This turnkey service requires no setup, no course development time, no software installation, and no new hardware. Your employees can self-register, and training can be taken anytime (24/7), anywhere there is a PC and an Internet connection. Courses take only about 30 minutes to complete.


No time to prepare or deliver training? With BLR®’s Training Today, your employees can start taking essential training courses the same day you sign up. Workers (and supervisors) train at their convenience, 24/7. We track, and you save with this turnkey solution. Yes, it really can be this simple. Learn more.


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!
These are all motivational, actionable courses—for both employees and supervisors—in such key areas as sexual harassment, FMLA, diversity, communication, USERRA, recruiting, and many more. The courses are kept up to date to reflect federal and state regulatory changes, and what’s more, BLR adds new programs continually.
BLR’s Training Today site also includes a selection of safety courses—you decide whether you want just the HR courses, the safety courses, or both HR and safety.
If it sounds as if we’re excited about this new service, well, we are—and so is the Software & Information Industry Association, which just voted the BLR Employee Training Center (forerunner of Training Today) the “Best Workforce Training Solution.” Find out what all the buzz is about—sign up for a no-obligation trial to Training Today.

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