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When an employee or contractor starts at a new company, their opinion of what is deemed acceptable behaviour towards health and safety will be formed within the first few days or weeks of their employment. It is therefore important that a company’s safety communications reinforce expected employee behaviour from the moment they walk through the door.
A clear and straightforward safety induction programme should be developed to both reinforce expected behaviours and to allow your company to check that employees and contractors have learned and understood your health and safety rules and procedures. The programme should provide health and safety inductiontraining to all people who work with your company and should include a specific health and safety induction for new employees.
A comprehensive safety induction programme should also include provision for a visitor safety induction and a site safety induction as these will differ from the main programme for new employees or contractors. The visitor safety induction promotes the vision of a zero harm culture by reinforcing the belief that all people who visit or work with your company are expected to adhere to your safety rules. It also helps to raise the profile of your company (and that of health and safety in general) as visitors will leave your premises with the knowledge that you take the safety of everyone seriously. A site safety induction is essential for all the people your company, both employees and contractors, you have working on site. It is a useful safety induction to have because it can be given to people attending sites for short visits, as a refresher course, or for those people moving out to work on site who may have previously only been office based.
A good safety induction example that enables companies to provide such a varied health and safety induction programme is the e-learning solutions provided by Safety Coaching. Their e-induction software creates tailor-made health and safety induction modules that focus on your individual company’s requirements and specifications.
One of the reasons e-induction software is so useful is that it provides a high level of consistency in your training. It guarantees that all of the people working with your company have undergone the same training programme. It also allows you to save time and money as once the modules have been created for you they can be used repeatedly without the need to utilise time yoru management team can be doing something else. The bespoke e-software packages provided by Safety Coaching can also allow you to track the performance of each person within your organisation by recording their individual training scores.
An e-induction programme offered by Safety Coaching is specifically packaged and designed to engage the learner. Learners are encouraged to interact with the software as it stimulates all of the main learning receptors through visual clues, audio description and interaction through games and tasks set out on the screen. The personal touch can also be added to the training as the software can be modified to recognise certain personal information and refer to the learner by name. Safety Coaching provide e-inductions that are designed to suit the needs of all the different people who work for your company.
Safety Coaching’s emphasis on visual and audio learning not only helps to aid learning but can also be extremely useful for those people in your company who have learning difficulties. Visual learning can also help your company transcend language and cultural barriers , ensuring all of the people who work for you can understand the safety messages you need to get across.
Safety Coaching can also offer your company their expertise in other areas of safety communications. For example, they can help your company to find new and innovative ways to get your health and safety message across to all of the people within your employment. One effective way to do this is to produce cartoon (picture stories) that enact what would happen if your health and safety rules are not followed. This transference of theory to practice (in the safe environment of a story) can be just enough to ensure your employees will learn how to prevent accidents occurring in the first place, and what to do if an accident does occur.
Another area of Safety Coaching’s expertise is in helping members of your Senior management to prepare key safety message documents. They can also provide coaching and briefings to ensure that your Senior management team are able to clearly and effectively get across critical safety messages when speaking to people at all levels within your organisation.
Click here to find out more about the different services Safety Coaching can provide for your company’s safety induction and communications: http://www.safetycoaching.co.uk/safety-communications.html