Trust, communication, and respect are essential to a healthy workplace. For these to exist, all levels of the organization need to understand the characteristics that ensure this and commit to an ongoing effort to make it a reality.
If your goal is a superior, high-performance office environment that is focused on and dedicated to continuous improvement of your workforce, you need to implement a health and safety training program.
While you know that fulfilling your company’s health and safety obligations is a legal requirement, here are four additional advantages of health and safety training that explain why it’s key to a high-performing office environment.
1. It informs workers and managers about workplace hazards.
Health and safety training is an essential tool for informing workers and managers about workplace hazards so they can work more securely and be more productive.
Exceptional health and safety training provides workers, employers, managers, and supervisors with:
- The knowledge and skills that are needed for work to be performed safely and to avoid the creation of hazards that could place workers or customers at risk.
- Awareness and understanding of any potential workplace hazards and a transparent process for identifying, reporting and controlling them.
- Specialized training for businesses where work involves unique hazards.
2. It can be specialized, as well as bring teams together.
One of the benefits of taking a NEBOSH course is that health and safety training can be specialized depending on the roles assigned to employers or individual managers, supervisors, and workers.
For example, employers, managers, and supervisors may require additional training to ensure that they can fulfill their roles and provide leadership, direction, and resources for the safety and health program. Workers assigned specific tasks in a workplace may need training to ensure their full participation in those functions.
Knowing that co-workers are adequately equipped to deal with workplace hazards creates a secure bond between employees.
3. It enables workers to be more productive.
A surefire sign that employees feel comfortable and safe in their high-performing work environment is when they have a commitment to excellence that rivals the CEO’s.
In your office environment, you most likely have workers who spend a lot of time sitting at a desk on their computer. Due to this, there is a high chance that they will begin to experience back, hand or wrist ache.
There is also a high likelihood that they will refrain from raising it as an issue and instead will choose to suffer in silence, albeit working slower than usual. They may even take an increased number of unofficial breaks to deal with the pain.
However, a manager who is well-trained in health and safety can perform a thorough health and safety audit to check for these types of occurrences. Once you’ve identified the specific problems in your office environment, you can take the necessary steps to ensure that your employees are protected from these types of injuries, and that you have implemented the resources they require to be as productive as possible.
Employees may also consider online learning or classroom learning, a setup that will allow them to invest in their healthy and safety education without hindering their productivity.
4. It provides legal protection against damages.
With or without a formal policy, as a company, you must take reasonable steps to care for the health of your staff.
If, as a business owner, you are proven to have been negligent in safeguarding your employees against accident or illness, you can be held personally responsible, which may lead to fines or even imprisonment. For this reason, implementing the appropriate health and safety training and techniques will assure that your firm is documenting and investigating any minor incidents, thus reducing the chance of injury and subsequent claims.
In addition to informing workers and managers about workplace hazards and thus enabling them to be more productive, an additional benefit of health and safety training is that it provides employees with a deeper understanding of the safety and health program itself so that they can contribute to its development and implementation.
The time and attention you pay to health and safety training will reap your business the high-performance status of a superior workforce. This is the performance that will enable your organization to achieve its dreams and goals.
AUTHOR BIO: Dave Newgass is the owner and Managing Director of Wise Global Training Ltd. Born and raised in a small California coastal fishing town but now living in the United Kingdom, Dave’s goal is to ensure that clients are not only happy with the IOSH and NEBOSH online courses they purchase from Wise Global Training Ltd., but are also happy with the total experience as a whole.