Employees in their first month at work are three times more prone to injury than the workers who have been there for over a year.
The reason is simple. These new employees are faced with new assignments, unfamiliar equipment and tools, funny-sounding names and terms they are not used to. These examples are just a few of what new employees face. As a result, it is not difficult to perceive how health and safety considerations can easily be ignored. When this happens, incidents occur.
Therefore, Health and Safety Managers should discover effective approaches to enable new employees to maintain a strategic distance from injuries during their first few, high-risk, weeks on the job. The solution is an efficient employee on-boarding and induction process.
Step 1. Decide on what to Incorporate into an Employee Induction Process
For you to deliver your employee induction process, you will need a learning management system (LMS). This system enables you to deliver the Health and Safety training to new employees on a flexible schedule without it taking your time or reducing the productivity of your managers.
Of course, there is a considerable measure of ground to cover when inducting new employees. The beauty of using an LMS is that you can record the session once and you can send new employees the link to take the induction.
Health and Safety Managers see employee inductions as an avenue to build up a positive culture of safety in the organisation. You are in charge of being compliant, and you must get new employees up to speed as quickly as possible without hindering productivity – an online onboarding process is a key.
Step 2. Utilize an Employee Induction Checklist
Employee induction checklists are a helpful starting point when you go about enhancing your onboarding procedure. Contingent upon your industry, your business, and your frameworks and processes, this checklist may include a variety of health and safety policies that are particular to your employees’ needs.
With that said, outlined below are the fundamentals every induction process includes:
- Emergency procedures, including instructions for evacuation, crisis assembly locations, emergency exits, fire alarms, and fire equipment like extinguishers, etc.
- First aid treatment
- Information relating to organisational health and safety legislations to increase compliance
- Safe work practices
- Protective equipment and gear requirements and condition, for example, safety glasses or work gloves
- Risks and dangers innate to your particular working environment
These are general, but vital, additions in employee inductions. A useful checklist will be one that is consistently evolving in light of feedback from employees and emerging dangers from within the working environment.
This form can quiz employees on health and safety policies and ask for recommendations that can be used to iterate your induction checklist.
Step 3. Consistently Enhance Employee Inductions over Time
The best way to test the effectiveness of anything is to gather enough feedback. With the right feedback and accurate, unbiased reports, you can be able to use to fine-tune your employee inductions over time.
A simple way to gather this data is to create a feedback request form that you will send out a few weeks after the induction. You can automate this process for full-time employees. However, this is not necessary for contract workers who might only be working for a short while.
The feedback request form can test employees on health and safety policies and request suggestions that can be utilized to emphasize your induction checklist.
In conclusion
For you to create a thorough, successful employee induction, you require a checklist that can be produced and enhanced as times go by.
Beakon’s suite of software enables you to build dynamic employee and contractor onboarding lessons that will have your workers hit the ground being productive. Start a no-risk free trial today to get started.
