There is a lot that goes into creating a safe workplace, but training is a fundamental part of it. If there are safety lapses or concerns, additional training is often part of the solution. But how do you know what kind of training your employees need?
This requires a training need assessment to find the gaps in your current training program. If you don’t have a need assessment example to follow, here are some of the key steps your business can follow to learn more about your safety training needs.
The first step in solving anything is understanding the problem in the first place. To understand your needs, go back to the beginning and analyze the problem. Did something happen to make you think there is an issue? Have employees mentioned feeling unprepared for certain tasks? Collect and analyze information that makes you think there is a problem or flaw in your training that needs to be addressed.
When analyzing the problem, it’s important to be as specific as possible when identifying the pain points. There may not be a problem with your entire training process, only certain parts of it. Therefore, it’s important to identify the specific pain points so that you can keep what’s working and only address or change what needs to be improved.
If you’re going to assess your training needs, there should be a specific end goal in mind for what you’re trying to accomplish. This is why analyzing the situation and finding the specific pain points are important steps. You need to know exactly what needs to be improved so that you understand what improvement looks like. Once you have addressed your needs, what’s going to be different? How do you want things to be better? If you can’t set a goal, how do you know that you have successfully addressed your training needs?
With a specific goal in mind, the next step is to brainstorm solutions that can potentially fill your needs and improve your company’s training. Keep in mind that there could be more than one way to adequately address your needs. Of course, the more potential solutions you have, the better your chances of finding a viable solution. This means brainstorming potential solutions and assessing each one so that you have an idea of what solution has the best chance of succeeding.
Once you know your training needs and how you’re going to address those needs, create a timeline for how things are going to be implemented. It always helps to have target dates in mind and a list of priorities in case there are different solutions you’re going to implement. Just blindly trying new things to address your needs isn’t going to be effective. There should be a specific plan in place for what you’re going to do and how you’re going to measure its success. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be changes to the timeline at some point. But there should be a rough outline for how changes will be implemented, and training needs addressed.
The best way to address any needs related to training or workplace safety is to have a safety management system in place. That’s why the software solutions from EHS Insight can be helpful to businesses in all industries. Our software helps to manage all aspects of workplace safety, including training, audits, and compliance matters. With our software in place, your company will stay ahead of safety issues, solve problems that pop up, and manage workplace safety more effectively.
If our software sounds like a good fit, call us anytime and we can have our system up and running in no time.