Fitting in health and safety training for your team can be a serious challenge. It’s often hard enough to find time for a simple team meeting, let alone a full, multi-day training session. So how can employers and employees get around this? In recent years, more businesses have been turning to online training to solve this pressing issue.

What is online training?

Online training refers to any training course that takes place online. If you’ve taken a job in the last few years, the odds are that you’ve done some kind of online training. Online training has a number of advantages to onsite training. It allows people to learn on their own time, at their own pace, instead of being rushed through the process. This also means that the training course can easily be customized around your staff’s schedules, and even better, doesn’t need to distract from your day-to-day operations.

Additionally, opting for an online training course means that you’re cutting down on other operational costs such as transportation, accommodation and venue.

As an employer, what are your legal obligations?

Under British law, employers have an obligation to ensure that the work environment is safe from risks to the employees who work in it. It is an employer’s duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of their employees and other people who might be affected by their business. As part of this law, employers must do whatever is reasonably practicable to achieve this.

This means making sure that workers and others are protected from anything that may cause harm, effectively controlling any risks to injury or health that could arise in the workplace. Employers have a duty to assess risks in the workplace. Risk assessments should be carried out that address all risks that might cause harm in your workplace.

Wherever your company is located, as an employer, you must give your employees information about the risks in your workplace and the measures that you’ve taken to protect them, as well as instructing and training your staff on how to deal with the risks that they come into contact with.

What’s covered in an online health and safety training?

A reputable health and safety program should also be suitable for both the employer and employee, meaning that your entire staff can benefit from it.

Online health and safety training covers the essential facts to help you work more safely and contribute to the overall safety of your organization. The issues covered by training should include fundamental concepts of risk assessment; common workplace health and safety hazards and how to control them; how to improve health and safety performance; emergency procedures and first aid and essential ways to protect the environment.

Training should conclude with a proficiency test, allowing your team to test the knowledge and skills that they’ve just covered, and drawing attention to any areas in which they might need some additional support.

Written on behalf of EduCare.