Staff Health & Safety Training Challenges

For a business of any size, located anywhere or in any sector; getting its managers trained in health and safety is paramount. The extent to which a company is run can be excellently transformed by effective training.

Are you considering how to effectively train your team leaders and managers and defy the usual difficulties of motivation, commitment, availability, to name a few, then considered the below solutions:

Why must we do health and safety training?

This is undoubtedly one of the most usual complaints that managers of organisations have to hear from staff. If you need your team(s) trained in IOSH Managing Safely course, having them see the benefit of the training is vital. Once they understand the benefits, it will have a positive impact on their work (increase performance and less time lost to incidents), this should motivate them to complete the health and safety course. At an individual level, successfully completing a course could help them improve professionally.

Relevance

If you expect your employees to attend a safety course, you need to make them understand that it is related and vital to day-to-day work activities. Comprising of your company health and safety regulations, procedures, risk assessments etc. amidst the training if proper, gives a purposeful chance to utilise the learning in context and have direct relevance. Bringing training concepts to reality using workplace examples can change significantly any learning experience to inspire confidence in people to learn how to work effectively and thoroughly.

Recognition of training benefits

Increasingly, more companies value and understand the advantages of effective safety training, especially internationally regarded NEBOSH and IOSH training. For organisations with staff, NEBOSH or IOSH certified, it shows a dedication to good health and safety practice; enhancing good reputation amidst all stakeholders – vital for business.


The staff that take part in training feel more confident and motivated in their tasks with the vital chance to improve their set of skills to perform better in their roles and work smarter, which their superiors and the company will certainly value. Staff feel more confident and are aware of how to act in certain situations; resulting in them becoming more safety conscious and proactive.

How can I fit the training into my schedule?

This could be the biggest complaint staff state when they have to attend a health and safety training course. In practice, attending classes such as IOSH Managing Safely course for 4 working days can put staff under immense pressure. Productivity could suffer, and workloads will increase if your workforce attends class-based training. Likewise, it can be challenging to manage staff in different locations with different shift patterns in IOSH Managing Safely. The cost and time can be complicated.

Flexible learning solution

There are manoeuvrable, flexible solutions to overcome location and time barriers for giving training to a group of staff or team. There are a lot of conveniences from flexible online health and safety and e-learning courses. Individuals can decide on when to train to fit into their family commitments and work. However, as perfect as this may seem, through our experience getting teams trained and certified, we know that course completion is usually the main difficulty.

Online combined with class learning

Have you taken into consideration the mixture of class-based and online learning for your employees? Organising a combination of manoeuvrable online learning with the interaction and structure of class-based learning is the perfect solution utilised by companies. While planning the training, it is important to look into the benefits of online learning and a combined class for employees. Mapping out the company and team’s requirements will deliver a comfortable schedule that ensures everyone completes the course successfully and is ready to utilise their newly learned skills.


For a combination of class and online learning for a course like IOSH Managing Safely, usually, the staff will go through a scheduled rolling programme to work through and finish the training. They will be attending the online course and still enjoy the benefits of having a tutor that will walk them through all the required skills through the face-to-face session(s) and/ or webinar. The tutor is again present to aid everybody throughout the training remotely. This combined approach to getting employees trained in a scheduled time frame and with all staff benefitting from the flexible learning to suit their commitments and pace has been adopted by prominent multi-national companies.


Adequate health and safety training is not only legally binding to an employer but also an enormous contributory factor to the success of a company. Thus, whatever challenges and obstacles you face when getting employees efficiently trained, getting the best course and the most effective delivery method is the fundamental foundation.