Communicating Effective Mandatory Health and Safety Training: A Challenging Task For Any Business

Health and safety: Vitally important words that often elicit yawns when uttered in the workplace. After all, isn’t being careful just common sense? Why spend hours going over mandatory training that everyone knows?

Maybe that was the thinking in two recent news stories. In the first, a new business operator decided to skip mandatory training and relied on someone else to fill in the gaps. The problem was—this person had a long history of workplace negligence and landed the operator in deep legal trouble. The second is more tragic; a young worker fell through a class roof to his death. He was provided with no health and safety or accredited training.

Legal problems and deaths are the extreme ends of the scale when dealing with health and safety training. So why, when the stakes are so high, do some companies and employees take such a laissez-faire approach to health and safety?

Perhaps it’s due to the time it takes. Health and safety is a broad and dense topic with many areas to cover. It’s not uncommon to have full day inductions. Added to this, much of the training provided isn’t industry-specific and is irrelevant to those taking part, causing people to switch off entirely. After all, humans spend nearly 47% of the day daydreaming. And don’t forget the all-important monetary cost; time spent training is time that could be spent making a profit.

It’s time for a new approach to health and safety training, especially in a post-pandemic world where health guidelines are updated every day. Employees need to be up-to-date and informed in engaging ways, not mass-gathered for another time-consuming toolbox talk. 

By rethinking the outdated onboarding approach, Tribuco Knowledgebase has created a new path: Microtraining. Videos that are quick, concise, and educational, designed to be rewatched in our app whenever needed.

We cover a wide range of topics; from health and safety to depression, our microtraining keeps employees upskilled with constantly updating videos. Our engaging content means that employees take in vital information. The concise information is designed to be watched again, when needed. By scanning a QR code at a workstation, employees can be trained with information that they need to know, which can all be tracked in an online portal that safeguards you from potential future claims.

Health and safety training should be a mandatory and vital part of any hiring process, but it must be there to genuinely educate—not to cover oneself in case of an accident. Every employee wants a safe productive work environment, and it’s up to management to foster that environment with the latest effective training methods.