Step 4
Training
The aim of this whole process is to ensure a safe working environment for all staff.
Training is an essential part of that, building and maintaining a robust safety system within your organisation.
The Health and Safety Executive clearly states ‘Everyone who works for you needs to know how to work safely and without risk to their health. This includes contractors and self-employed people.’
As a minimum, you must make sure everyone is aware of:
Lone Worker Training can be grouped into 2 sections
Through the work involved in Steps 1 to 3 of our 5 Steps to Employee Protection, you have identified the hazards, assessed the risks and created measures to address these. In addition, in Step 3 you communicated all of this across the organisation. It’s now time to ensure everybody understands how to follow your safe systems of work.
General Awareness
You should ensure employees are aware of
- Their rights and responsibilities as a lone worker
- The risks and hazards present
- How to assess risks in a changing environment: Dynamic Risk Assessment
Depending on the specific risks present, you may want to provide training on
- General Personal Safety
- Travel Safety (domestic)
- Travel Safety (abroad)
- Conflict Management and Resolution
- Home Visits / Working in the Community
Solution Training
As well as training employees in how to handle specific situations, it’s important to ensure they’re properly trained on their lone worker solution to provide them with the best level of protection, when they need it most.
And it’s not only the solution users that need training. It’s equally important that their managers are trained on operating methods and the long-term success of compliance, encouraging a safety culture within the organisation
What should training for managers cover?
- How their employees should use the solutions in line with the set policy (including expectation on usage)
- How to use the portal to check usage levels and individual compliance, alerting them to those that may need further training or encouragement
- Highlight their role in maintaining ongoing use, ensuring usage becomes part of the employee’s daily routine and instilling the habit within their teams, intervening where usage drops
- Meticulously managing usage, bringing lone working onto the agenda of regular team meetings, building into performance reviews, and scheduling usage according to specific projects.
The lone worker solution provider should provide all of the training sessions, content and materials required to use the solution effectively. With Pick Protection, we will work with you to ensure all of these training requirements are met.
It’s also important to consider how new-starts will be trained and refresher sessions will be provided. Ideally, your Health and Safety ambassadors or selected team members can be trained in a ‘train the trainer’ manner to ensure you have complete flexibility to provide face to face training whenever required. High quality training materials and e-learning platforms also provide effective tools for on-going development.
Brilliant!
You’ve introduced the solution and given it the best start. Now the challenge is maintaining the high standard of usage and compliance to your policies.