How to ensure your staff health & safety training requirements are met

“But I didn’t think that applied to me!” If a little voice inside your head is telling you that health and safety training doesn’t apply to you and your business you’re probably wrong.

In reality the size of your business doesn’t actually matter, it is what you do and how many people you employ that’s the key to knowing what training you need to provide your staff. The term health and safety seems to strike fear into the hearts of even the hardiest business people but why?

Let’s look at it in its simplest terms.

You are simply required to look after the health of your employees whilst at work and ensure that they are as safe as possible carrying out the duties that are given to them for their role within the company.

One of the biggest fear factors that we find when we speak to new clients to understand their needs is that health and safety training is complicated and expensive.

This is simply not the case, here is why…

You can provide health and safety training to all of your staff in all of the areas that they need to understand for just a few pounds per head. Investing a few pounds in each staff member every year to ensure that they are fully briefed and up-to-date is the equivalent of buying just a few cakes or coffees!

Also Health and safety training is actually very easy to deploy these days as part of a blended approach are is not at all complicated. With solutions like ours with ClickHSE training, courses can be carried out at any time and from anywhere, office or home, with just an internet connection.

So, now that now that the cost of health and safety training (or in fact how little it costs) is out of the way and knowing its quite easy to get in place let’s dive into what training you are obliged to provide your employees and explore why and when it is required.

To kick off let’s start with one of the absolute essentials for any business – Fire Safety Training.

Fire Safety Training

Sadly we all know that accidents can sometimes be unavoidable and fire can also sometimes fall within this category.

We are humans, we are not perfect and often work in premises where an outbreak of fire could be detrimental to the business, pose serious injury to staff and visitors or sadly in some instances cause fatalities.

To reduce the risk of an outbreak of fire, and, more to the point the risk of injury or death to a person many governments around the world decided to make fire safety awareness training a mandatory requirement some years ago.

In the UK, where we are based at AT&F, this is actually written into legislation, enforced by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and is a compulsory requirement as part of the The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 for any businesses employing people to provide this to their employees, with annual refresher training for each member of staff.

Ideally this training should be provided on or before the first days as part of their induction when joining the company as no one can predict when a fire may be encountered. The training should include the following topics.

The location and use of the escape routes
Any special door locking devices.
The location, operation and meaning of the fire alarm system
Types of fire extinguisher
Location of fire assembly points.
Plus any site specific notices.

It is important to note that there is a legal duty of responsibility by the business owner or responsible person to ensure that all employees are provided adequate training and common sense says that knowing your CO2 fire extinguisher from your foam fire Extinguisher in the event of a fire would be sensible for everybody!

There really is no excuse, both practically, financially and legally, for putting peoples lives at risk in the hope that an outbreak of fire wouldn’t occur.

Our view at AT&F is that every employee should be well versed in what to do if a fire was to start and due to this we make basic fire safety training both straightforward for employees and cost-effective for employers so as not to put a financial barrier in place for businesses of any size, from start-ups, to SMEs and to multinational blue-chip companies.

Now that we have covered that fire training is an absolute essential for your businesses health and safety training requirements you might be asking what’s next?

Well that really depends on what your business does or, more to the point, what your employees do whilst carrying out the roles within the business.

There are a few courses where we see from our data that nearly every company provides who use ClickHSE for health and safety training for all of their employees, no matter what their job role.

With various pieces of legislation covered, here is the insider tips to look at the other courses you should consider having in place for everybody within your business.

This allows each employee to make the right decisions when it comes to carrying out their basic work and gives you, the business owner, peace of mind that you have provided adequate and suitable training to protect the health and safety of the wonderful people that work for you.

Manual handling training

Manual handling does exactly as it says on the tin - it is handling objects manually where equipment such as forklift trucks either aren’t in place or not suitable, such as lifting up a heavy box from reception and carrying it to your office.

Due to the obvious frequency and need for manual handling whilst at work it is deemed pretty essential that your employees know how to pick things up and move them correctly, without hurting themselves (as nobody likes a bad back!).

Manual handling training covers all of the essential techniques that’s an employee needs to know to ensure that any objects can be assessed and moved safely.

To many this may seem obvious – “the box looks big so I’m not going to lift it” - however, often this is not the case. Sadly whilst at work people often move things that they shouldn’t or in an incorrect way and the end result his personal injury. Nobody likes personal injury, neither the staff member, the manager or the business owner.

Personal injury is a huge course of staff absence resulting in loss time, missed opportunities and sometimes even solicitors letters. The easiest way to avoid all of this is to simply provide adequate manual handling training by default to all staff :-)

DSE Training

DSE stands for Display Screen Equipment and is a term often used in health and safety circles but something that you may not have heard of.

You need to be aware that providing DSE training is a legal requirement in the UK for any employee using a computer or tablet for more than 2 hours a day and is applicable in many other countries.

So what is DSE training and why do you need it? A term that you may be more familiar with to help explain this is RSI.

RSI stands for repetitive strain injury which is caused by repeating the same movement or position over and over again. For example, typing or moving the mouse backwards and forwards 1 trillion times a day across your desk.

Just like with manual handling, injury cases from RSI is sadly commonplace and can result in sickness, lost time, decreased productivity, absence and possibly a longer term physical issue that is difficult to resolve and get rid of.

By providing DSE training for those employees working frequently with computer equipment such as laptops, desktops, PCs and tablets you can quickly make your employee aware of these potential injuries and give them the knowledge and insight that they need to prevent it even happening.

As a ‘techie-business’ we work with computers a lot at AT&F and take the DSE training requirement really seriously so we also added in content within our course to cover office ergonomics such as correct seating posture and positioning.

Ever wondered what all of those knobs levers and dials do under your office chair? Well by carrying out the speedy 45 minute all-in-one training course your teammates will join a growing number of office professionals with that magic knowledge!

Fire warden training

We touched on fire safety training a little earlier in this post but it is just as important to mention fire warden/fire marshal training.

The fire warden or fire Marshall is the appointed person within your business that manages both the reduction of fire risk and management of evacuation in the event of a fire.

There is no hard and fast rule as to who should be a fire warden or fire Marshall and how many fire wardens or fire marshals business should have within its premises.

A sensible recommendation for this is to use a 1 to 10 ratio - One fire warden or fire marshal for every 10 members of staff. It sounds a lot at face value but think about it, it really isn’t.

It’s simply just adequate.

For a small business with up to 10 members of staff then it makes sense that at least one person has someone has some advanced fire warden or fire marshal training to take control and manage everything relating to fire safety.

For a large business with 1000 staff then it is likely that employees are spread out over different rooms, offices buildings and facilities. If this is the case and, let’s say, you have 100 staff members of staff per building then you can imagine how difficult it would be for one fire warden to plan a quick and safe evacuation for those people.

Large buildings, such as offices factories and warehouses, are often split into smaller zones so it makes perfect sense that there is a localised fire warden or fire marshal for each zone and makes even more sense that a fire Marshall doesn’t have to move between lots of offices to ensure people are evacuating safely.

By providing fire warden or fire marshal training (the term is often interchangeable) you can ensure that maximum protection and safety is afforded to your employees should the worst happen.

Ok great, so is that everything I need to meet my staff health and safety training obligations?

Actually, the four courses outlined above are just the bare minimum that applies to most job roles.

Every position within a company has a different set of duties and as a manager or employer you should review the tasks that are required to be carried out within the role and identify any areas of risk to the employee.

This is called a risk assessment (you can find out more about risk assessments here)

By carrying out a risk assessment for each role you can then add in training courses to ensure that the person carrying out the role is up to speed on what they need to do and how they need to do it.

Some things will be very specific to your business and will require individual training which is often provided as part of an ‘onboarding’ or ‘induction’ process when a new staff member joins the company. For example if you employ a machinery operative you will need to show them the safe and approved way to operate the machine they use to and record that you gave done this.

Simply relying on the fact that they had epxiernce in another business of carrying ot the same process is really not good enough and certainly doesn’t show your duty of care should a problem or injury occur.

There are a wide range of topics that need specialist expertise and require an understanding of current legislation which is where a library of pre designed and accredited off-the-shelf training courses come into play.

For example if you use or store chemicals in your business then the staff who handle these products will need something called COSHH training. Now when we say chemicals we aren’t just talking about oil refineries. Chemicals is a wide ranging subject to people such as cleaners who use chemicals to carry out their job (think bleach, toilet cleaner, etc) will need this training also.

Conclusion

It may sound like a lot of work to do but it is actually normally quite a straightforward task and knowing that your staff have adequate health and safety training will give everyone peace of mind, yourself included.

With over 20 years expertise and 50+ courses at our disposal we are here to help so if you need some guidance on what courses we can quickly provide for your business or sector may just get in touch and we will be pleased to help you.

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