Angela Carney, managing director at Carney Consultancy, answers the question: how can businesses better their commitment to health & safety training?
Firstly, a business needs to ask itself whether it actually wants to better its commitment? Assuming it does, then, why?
If it’s because they have to for tenders and contracts, then fine, the employer will undertake the training, but only the training that they have to and their employees won’t see the importance, as the people at the top don’t. In this instance, the business is doing it because legally and contractually, it has to. These companies need enlightening as to why training staff makes good business sense.
A company may wish to improve its commitment to health and safety because it believes that protecting employees is the right thing to do. It will make employees realise how important health and safety is to the company and they will feel valued and invested in.
Employees who feel more valued are more committed, loyal and productive – it also sends a cultural and moral message.
As they move forward with training, employers often look to personalise the programmes based on the benefit to each employee, depending on their role. This is the opportunity to attract more new people and upskill those already in the business.
We have a skills crisis in the country. So, attracting new people and upskilling has never been as important as it is now. When a company actively looks to commit to health and safety training, it will usually be open to consider other types of training.
My experience is that management and leadership training, is also very important. All too often, we put people in management and leadership positions without support and training and this can lead to poor execution of the role and a greater loss of staff. So, training in all areas is key.
As a business, when we employ people we lay out a clear training programme spanning two – five years with milestones and rewards for each step reached. So, employees have goals and routes to achieve them. We’ve invested in all our consultants, training them from scratch. We have a basic level of training everyone receives, then we see where their skills and desires lie and work with them to further train them in specific areas. We are continually investing in training, which results in certain team members reaching levels of experience and qualifications that takes them to senior roles either in our business or elsewhere, if they move on. For example, Sarah James, our health and safety consultant, who, before she came to us, was struggling to get her previous employer to invest in her training. After four years with us, Sarah achieved NEBOSH Certificate & Diploma, NVQ Level 6 (to name a few of the courses undertaken), achieving Chartered membership status with IOSH and doubling her joining salary. Sarah, has now been given a career opportunity which could take her all over the globe. We could not offer this currently, so, she has understandably taken on this new challenge in the knowledge that she has the technical competence as a health and safety professional, thanks to our investment in her.
People often say they don’t want to waste time and money training people who will just leave. Some will, its natural and necessary for a business to develop. However, others won’t leave and just because people leave doesn’t mean they won’t return! If you weigh up how much more a business receives back from its employees who are trained and invested in, it does makes good business sense to train them fully.
