Yesterday we looked at the many benefits of turning over various safety responsibilities to your employees. Today we move on to assessing and planning your safety training.
Legal Issues
The need for safety training is sometimes only implied in OSHA legislation, rather than spelled out. BLR’s Safety Audit Checklists notes, for example, that the general housekeeping standard (29 CFR 1910.22) says that “all places of employment” must be kept “clean and neat,” and describes what that means. It doesn’t require that employees be trained in the standard, but it would be hard to meet its requirements without (a) advising employees of the existence of the standard and (b) training them in how to comply with it.
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Broad requirements like Hazard Communication, PPE Assessment, and certainly, the General Duty Clause, put much responsibility on management to identify training needs without simply relying on rules. Other more specific requirements, like Lockout/Tagout and Confined Spaces, have very detailed requirements you must follow.
Management Issues
Finding the areas where training is needed is only the first step. Next, according to Safety Audit Checklists, you should:
- Set priorities. Pay attention to those areas that pose the greatest threats first.
- Determine the who, what, when, where, how. The main point to remember is to organize the training around the question, “Who needs to know what?”
- Devise a system for combining coverage of “perennial topics” for all employees, with specific training for various subsets of employees.
Training Issues
When assessing training needs, it is important to remember that training may not be the best answer to problems or hazards you identify. Safety Audit Checklists says that you should ask yourself if the problem could be solved in some other way, such as by:
- Changing the type of equipment
- Changing the procedure
- New engineering controls (e.g., guards, ventilation fans)
- Increasing supervision or modifying how the supervision is done
- Getting more cooperation from employees
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A good source for training is provided by OSHA in its seven-step voluntary training guidelines. These steps are:
- Determining if training is needed
- Identifying training needs
- Identifying goals and objectives
- Developing learning activities
- Conducting the training
- Evaluating program effectiveness
- Improving the program
This kind of practical, actionable advice is a good example of why we are so high on Safety Audit Checklists. All told, this best-selling program provides you with more than 300 separate safety checklists, keyed to three main criteria:
- OSHA compliance checklists, built right off the government standards in such key areas as HazCom, lockout/tagout, electrical safety, and many more.
- “Plaintiff attorney” checklists, built around those non-OSHA issues that often attract lawsuits.
- Safety management checklists that monitor the administrative procedures you need to have for topics such as OSHA 300 Log maintenance, training program scheduling and recordkeeping, and OSHA-required employee notifications.
Make as many copies as needed for all your supervisors and managers, and distribute. What’s more, the entire program is updated annually. And the cost averages only about $1 a checklist.
If this method of ensuring a safer, more OSHA-compliant workplace interests you, we’ll be happy to make Safety Audit Checklists available for a no-cost, no-obligation, 30-day evaluation in your office. Just let us know, and we’ll be pleased to arrange it.