In the realm of health and safety, easier doesn’t necessarily mean better. This especially applies to health and safety training, so it’s no surprise that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has recently updated its best practice guidance. The new guidance increases the emphasis on face to face for training situations that require specific task or individual based content.
With the growth of the internet, there was tremendous growth in online courses to help businesses with their limited training budgets. Online health and safety training has its appeals; it is cost-effective, it reduces disruption during the working day and it is easy to deliver. No matter how good the online training may be, it is inevitably generic, therefore the use of online should be risk assessment driven.
Training should be about risk reduction. It needs to provide increased knowledge, competence and result in employees having a greater desire to work safely.
So how do you know when online training is suitable or when face to face training is required to meet your duty of care as an employer?
A good example is manual handling training.
For office-based manual handling, such as lifting reams of copy paper, online training is perfectly suitable. For more complex manual handling situations, training needs to be specially tailored. Face to face delivery, with practical demonstrations and staff interactions is the only way you can ensure that you’re meeting your duty of care, by ensuring the best learning outcomes and risk reduction is achieved.
While online training is convenient, it cannot be specific to every individual business, or job role. Every building has its own idiosyncrasies, and every business has its own unique way of working. Face to face training is personal, meaning it offers its own unique set of benefits.
Here are 8 reasons why face to face training benefits businesses in a way which online training can’t.
An estimated 137 million working days were lost due to sickness or injury in the United Kingdom in 2016, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This was equivalent to 4.3 days per worker, the lowest recorded rate since the series began in 1993, when the number was 7.2 days per worker.
But this is still an average of nearly a week for every member of your staff you will lose due to them being unfit for work. That will not be something you may have budgeted for at the beginning of the year!
At Park City, we deliver both online and face to face training. Years of experience enables us to know when online training does not deliver the best outcomes in terms of learning outcome, risk reduction and meeting an employer’s duty of care. We have the professional resources to deliver all our HR and H&S services face to face. We work this way because it is more powerful and provides a higher quality of outcomes.
Unlike toolkit, DIY Portal-based services, Park City Consultants save you valuable time. Who wants to waste time downloading that letter, populate it with all the relevant names and information, then print and send it? Better just to call and get us to do it!
If you’re looking to train a single member of staff or the whole team we can help. Explore our health & safety training and book a course today.
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