Safety training isn’t a one-and-done activity that takes place during onboarding. Rather, workers need to continuously be provided with the knowledge and skills to prioritize workplace safety. Risks change, as does worker behavior.

Beyond the potential for disruption or your ethical duty to reduce injuries, when workers see that your company prioritizes their well-being and safety, they feel more valued. Regularly giving your workers skills that empower them to be safer is a mutually powerful tool for your company and your workers alike.

Getting started in developing a year-round safety training calendar can be challenging. Let’s go through a few of the key steps you can take to create a system that is positive for your company and its workforce.

Assessing Your Needs

Creating a year-round safety training calendar can’t just be based on standard protocols. Each business has its own safety risks and needs. Given that safety impacts employee morale, taking the time to align protective practices to the specific challenges of your business can influence retention and engagement. After all, training and regular risk assessments are among the strategies recognized to enhance safety in a way that affects job satisfaction.

The best first step in developing the right educational program is to perform an audit with your specific safety record in mind. This evaluation should include the following.

Assessing past incidents

One of the best ways to plan the most relevant training calendar is to learn from the past. Examine the most common types of safety incidents and missteps in the last year or so. Explore their root causes. When there are trends in certain types of issues, this can suggest there are training gaps you need to fill.

Getting staff feedback

Reaching out to your workforce is a good way to better understand their current safety concerns and where they feel their knowledge and skills are lacking. On top of this, actively seeking employee feedback can improve engagement, which, in turn, can influence retention, productivity, and safety. Various ways exist for you to gain insights, from issuing targeted surveys to using feedback software that allows workers to contact you throughout the year. By analyzing these responses carefully, you can build impactful training into your calendar.

Reviewing industry standards

Each industry has its own ever-changing safety regulations and standards. It’s important to regularly review OSHA workplace safety training requirements to establish what updates you may need to incorporate into your training calendar. This might include educating your managers about new safety signage requirements or enhancing digital safety behavior related to data privacy regulations, among others.

Setting Objectives

Before you start populating your year-round safety calendar with courses, it’s wise to use the data you’ve gathered about safety needs to set some solid objectives. Doing so helps ensure that the resources you put in place are driven by preferred outcomes and that you can make relevant adjustments throughout the year to fit these.

You must gain clarity on what safety training goals are needed. This should be a combination of the needs you identified in your safety risk assessments and measurable metrics. For instance, if your workplace has too many trips and falls during certain activities, you can’t just base your training on the general need to reduce these.

Identify how much you need to reduce trips and falls, and on what time scale you intend to achieve this. Doing so helps you to understand how many employees you need to update by which quarters, enabling you to plan your training schedule accordingly. 

Eliminating risks immediately isn’t always practical, and you may see yourself rushing your training programs. Setting achievable targets throughout the year allows you to build your education gradually, integrate this knowledge into employees’ working practices, and follow up with assessments.

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Implementing Your Safety Training Calendar

With your research and objectives in place, you can start to build and implement your year-round training calendar. This generally begins with populating the most time-sensitive courses first. If protocols require you to update and educate staff about your safety signage in the first quarter, you need to treat this as a priority. From here, you can map out your year to meet your goals.

Another thing to consider is how staff engaging in safety training courses might impact productivity. Create a schedule that is mindful of both removing staff from their workspaces and putting pressure on staff that aren’t in courses. You might also develop a training calendar that incorporates in-person and online coursework that fits around your staff’s availability.

Budget plays a role in building and implementing a year-round calendar, too. Particularly for small businesses with limited resources, you need to establish what safety training expenditure your business can stand each quarter. From here, you can match the safety training needs with the resources you have available at different times of the year.

Remember to make the safety training calendar accessible to all members of staff at any time. Cloud-based calendar systems can be useful tools for this. You’ll find this is an important step because there may be courses that aren’t mandatory for all employees, but some workers might still want to gain the skills being taught.

The more safety knowledge you have across your business, the more your workplace will improve. Make certain there are easy ways for staff to contact leadership and sign up for training.

Conclusion

Continuous training minimizes the safety gaps that lead to injury, disruption, and turnover. You can build a year-round training calendar by leading with your safety needs and tying these to clear objectives, among other steps. Remember to keep assessing your calendar throughout the year. Needs and circumstances will change occasionally, and frequent assessments can keep your program agile and protect your workforce.

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Article by Indiana Lee.

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