To reiterate: Training is a vital part of your safety program, it may be required by specific standards that apply to your workplace, and it can provide a natural environment for communication between management and employees about safety and health issues.
But not all safety training will accomplish these ends. Badly planned, poorly executed training may do more harm than good if it fails to convey necessary information or leads to misunderstandings between management and workers.
According to Cal/OSHA, effective training:
- Allows group hazard identification and problem solving through demonstrations, questions, discussions, and observations and stories. Many workers have valuable experiences—invite their input. These workers can bring their stories of what did or did not work. If they feel welcome to speak, they will be more willing to ask questions and participate in discussions, which will help to cement information in their minds and encourage them to think of safety as a team effort rather than as a set of externally imposed rules.
Think you have no time to train? Think again. BLR’s 7-Minute Safety Trainer helps you fulfill key OSHA-required training tasks in as little as 7 minutes. Try it at no cost and see!
- Provides opportunities to demonstrate newly learned safe work practices and the safe use of tools, equipment, and chemicals. It’s important to let workers actually try out what they’re learning—you may discover problems this way. For example, the seat belt on the forklift might not fit a large worker, or the one-size-fits-all welding gloves won’t fit the new woman on the welding team. The time to learn these lessons is in training, rather than when life and limb are at stake.
- Provides concrete safety and health changes in how work is set up and performed. After the training, do more workers follow safe work procedures, treat safety as if it really matters, or wear their safety gear? Do your communications between management and workers on safety actually improve? If your training program produces no observable results, it’s time to rethink the program.
- Is repeated as often as necessary. This might mean at predetermined intervals, if you’re complying with a specific standard, but it might also mean whenever you observe a need for retraining—after an accident or near miss, when worker compliance with safe practices is slipping, or when a condition in your facility changes.
Follow and adapt these best practices to improve your own safety training program.
Effective, 7-minute sessions provide comprehensive safety training at an average cost of $1 a day. Get the details.
Now that you’ve got best practices for the logistics of how to conduct training sessions effectively, are you looking for training content? In other words, could you use out-of-the-box training sessions on dozens of key safety topics? BLR® has just the solution for you with 7-Minute Safety Trainer.
Effective Safety Training in Just 7 Minutes!
To help train employees in a broad range of safety and health topics, savvy safety professionals have relied on BLR’s 7-Minute Safety Trainer for years. This essential training resource allows you to provide concise, memorable training easily and effectively in just a few minutes. Materials are ready to use, and each session supplies a detailed trainer’s outline, as well as a handout, quiz, and quiz answers, to get your points across quickly—and cost-effectively.
All told, this “trainer’s bible” contains 50 prewritten meetings covering almost every aspect of safety you would want or need to train on, in a format designed to be taught in as little as 7 minutes each. All of them are perfect for getting new employees off to a safe start, as well as keeping veteran workers alert and up to date on all your safety concerns.
Major topics in the 7-Minute Safety Trainer include:
—Confined spaces
—Electrical safety
—Fire safety and emergency response
—HazCom
—Machine guarding and lockout/tagout
—Material handling
—PPE use and care
—Housekeeping/slips, trips, and falls
—And dozens more
Download Table of Contents
Download Sample Safety Meeting
Just make as many copies as you need of the included handouts and quizzes, and you’re ready to train.
Equally important is that the program ships new meetings every quarter to respond to new and changed regulations. This service is included in the program price, which averages just over $1 a working day. In fact, this is one of BLR’s most popular safety programs.
If you’d like to personally evaluate 7-Minute Safety Trainer and see how it can build safety awareness, we’ll be happy to send it to you for 30 days on a no-cost, no-obligation trial basis. Just let us know and we’ll arrange it. |
