X Tips for Improving Your Safety Training for New Hires
Your seasoned veterans on the job-site should already be familiar with the fundamentals of workplace safety, but your newest hires might be lagging behind. If you want your new hires to engage in your culture of safety and keep themselves and others as safe as possible, you need to train and educate them.
So how do you do it?
Why Safety Training Is So Valuable to New Hires
Let's start by explaining why new hire safety training is so important in the first place:
·Setting the tone (and first impressions). First, the earliest days of a new hire's work experience are going to set the tone for the rest of their time on the job-site. If you treat safety callously and with a wanton disregard, you're going to set their expectations that this is a lax and unsafe workplace. If you prioritize safety and make it a part of every conversation, they're going to fully understand just how important safety is here.
·Proactive and preventative measures. job-site safety is best treated proactively and preventatively. While it's important to analyze workplace injuries after they happen, it's much better to prevent them from happening in the first place. Providing early training is the best way to prevent workplace incidents from unfolding.
·Lack of initial information. Remember that your new hires are typically going in blind. They don't know what this workplace is like, they may not be familiar with their core responsibilities yet, and they certainly don't know what all your safety standards are. Accordingly, they're disproportionately vulnerable until you train and educate them about health and safety.
·Emphasizing the culture of safety. This is also your opportunity to prove that this organization takes safety seriously. Most employees want to work only on job-sites where their health and safety are treated as a high priority. If you gloss over safety training, they could end up losing confidence in this organization.
·Building comfort and familiarity. It's important for employees to feel comfortable asking questions and pointing out potential safety issues. By providing early training and creating an open, mutually trustworthy environment, you'll be teaching your employees that it's okay to come forward with questions and concerns.
How to Provide Safety Training to New Hires
These are some of the best strategies for providing safety training to new hires:
·Teach safety separately. It can be valuable to teach specific safety precautions alongside certain procedures or work responsibilities, but it's also important to teach safety as a separate concept. This allows you to go over general rules for health and safety in the workplace in addition to specific steps that are required for individual tasks.
·Teach safety first. We mean this in two different contexts. For starters, we want to teach a "safety first" mentality in our new hires; in other words, we want to explain to them the core principles of safety culture. We need to make sure every new hire understands that safety is our biggest priority. Second, we need to teach safety literally first, explaining the most important concepts for preventing injuries before digging into the details of each responsibility.
·Explain the risks. It's your duty as an employer to explain the risks of each job-site event, process, and task. What type of work will this employee be doing and what are the risks they face in that work? How do they reduce or eliminate those risks? Employees are much more likely to take safety practices seriously when they understand what might happen to them if they don't.
·Go over and post OSHA requirements. OSHA has strict laws and regulations that all businesses need to follow – with extra requirements for certain types of businesses and certain industries. It's important to go over all the OSHA requirements that apply to your business, and help employees understand where and how they can retrieve this information in the future.
·Show and tell. In the course of new hire training, it's a good idea to show and tell. Tell employees what your safety policies are, but also show them what those policies look like in action.
·Provide options for reporting. Always provide your new hires with straightforward options for reporting safety concerns, workplace injuries, and questions they have about safety policies. Make them feel safe and comfortable doing so.
·Create an open environment. Finally, do your best to create an open and trusting environment. Your workplace will be far safer if your employees feel confident voicing their perspectives and concerns.
New hires are often the most vulnerable people to injuries and workplace safety incidents, so training and educating them about workplace safety is a practical requirement. The more time and effort you spend proactively, the less likely you'll be to face workplace injuries in the future.
