It’s opinion in a significant number of businesses that, since all of their staff have decent health & safety instruction, they are adequately equipped for a crisis. Realistically though, a basic education in health & safety regulatory affairs simply is not adequate. Equipping your staff, selecting good supervision and organising frequent safety practise sessions are essential to the safety at work.
Every team must have a capable supervisor to oversee the shop floor, but this person also needs to perform another role in the company. Whomever you employ as the supervisor must see their health & safety training as fundamental and have the ability to encourage others to share their enthusiasm about it.
In addition to enforcing all of the rules and regulations, a supervisor’s job includes overseeing employee performance levels as well. Naturally it’s challenging to achieve all this at once. Good product knowledge is a necessity for a supervisory job in addition to an in-depth experience with up-to-date regulations regarding safety, risk appraisal and CPR. It just isn’t adequate to send any employees to a health & safety training course. To successfully identify a risk to their safety they must have to put their skills to the test. They have to know how to eradicate safety hazards as well as knowing what to do when something goes wrong. Not until these processes have become automatic are staff properly prepared.
Education is in reality not enough if you don’t keep the required safety equipment. If they are lacking the apparatus they require, or even notice that equipment is not working properly only after a crisis has happened, then all the education they have completed will have been a waste of time. Maintaining your equipment on a regular basis is fundamental. If you find your equipment is in poor working order, get it repaired or serviced as a matter of urgency. Appropriate health & safety training is critical to the safety of your employees, but they also need to have decent gear, scheduled practises, and a supervisor with contagious enthusiasm. If you take this advice you should find that health & safety legislation will before long become a natural part of life in the workplace rather than something troublesome for employees to remember all the time.
